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446 the fashion of 1864? Through all the changes in taste and moral and intellectual perception that may arise in that or a shorter interval, will his genius and his works be held at our estimate? Was he as a poet just what Rubens was as a painter, and will the pen of the one and the pencil of the other be put on the same footing and have the same chance for the admiration of future generations? No one can reason out the extreme ends of these parallels, or predict the verdict of another century with regard to these men. But the fact we have already cited will serve as the basis of a reasonable belief in this matter. It must have been a full hundred years after Shakespeare was laid down to his last sleep in the chancel of the church in which he was baptized, before he began to have a popular reputation, or a reading by even the educated classes in England. At the end of the second century that reputation had spread itself over the whole civilized world. From 1623 to 1823 no writers had arisen to eclipse or supersede his genius. In this wide interval hundreds of authors, widely read in their day, went down to oblivion, some to obloquy. They could not live on the sea of public opinion. Now we are in the middle of the third century of his fame. How does it rank at this moment in the estimation of the world? With all the new and brilliant literature that has flooded Christendom within the