It almost takes one's breath away to think that
"Hamlet" and the "Novum Organon" were at the risk of teething and measles
at the same time. But Ben was right also in thinking that eloquence had
grown backwards. He lived long enough to see the language of verse become
in a measure traditionary and conventional. It was becoming so, partly
from the necessary order of events, partly because the most natural and
intense expression of feeling had been in so many ways satisfied and
exhausted,--but chiefly because there was no man left to whom, as to
Shakespeare, perfect conception gave perfection of phrase. Dante, among
modern poets, his only rival in condensed force, says: "Optimis
conceptionibus optima loquela conveniet; sed optimae conceptiones non
possunt esse nisi ubi scientia et ingenium est; ... et sic non omnibus
versificantibus optima loquela convenit, cum plerique sine scientia et
ingenio versificantur."[125]
Shakespeare must have been quite as well aware of the provincialism of
English as Bacon was; but he knew that great poetry, being universal in
its appeal to human nature, can make any language classic, and that the
men whose appreciation is immortality will mine through any dialect to
get at an original soul.
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