Page:Shakspeare and His Times (1852).djvu/30

 ous ventures and patriotic enterprises followed each other in almost daily succession; and, far from becoming exhausted by this continual movement, the minds of men received from it fresh vigor and impulse. Thought claimed its share in the supply of pleasures, and became, at the same time, the sustenance of the most serious passions. While the crowd hurried on all sides into the numerous theatres which had been erected, the Puritan, in his solitary meditations, burned with indignation against these pomps of Belial, and this sacrilegious employment of man, the image of God upon earth. Poetic ardor and religious asperity, literary quarrels and theological controversies, taste for festivities and fanaticism for austerities, philosophy and criticism, sermons, pamphlets, and epigrams, appeared simultaneously, and jostled each other in admired confusion. Amid this natural and fantastic conflict of opposite elements, the power of opinion, the feeling and habit of liberty, were silently in process of formation: two forces, brilliant at their first appearance and imposing in their progress, the first-fruits of which belong to any skillful government that is able to use them, but the maturity of which is terrible to any imprudent government that may attempt to reduce them to servitude. The impulse which has constituted the glory of a reign, may speedily become the fever which will precipitate a people into revolution. In the days of Elizabeth, the movement of the public mind summoned England only to festivities; and dramatic poetry sprang into full being under the master-hand of Shakspeare.

Who would not delight to go to the fountain-head of the first inspirations of an original genius; to penetrate into the secret of the causes which guided his nascent powers; to follow him step by step in his progress; and,