It should be
deferred to as authority in all cases where it does not make Shakespeare
write bad sense, uncouth metre, or false grammar, of all which we believe
him to have been more supremely incapable than any other man who ever
wrote English. Yet we would not speak unkindly even of the blunders of
the Folio. They have put bread into the mouth of many an honest editor,
publisher, and printer for the last century and a half; and he who loves
the comic side of human nature will find the serious notes of a
_variorum_ edition of Shakespeare as funny reading as the funny ones are
serious. Scarce a commentator of them all, for more than a hundred years,
but thought, as Alphonso of Castile did of Creation, that, if he had only
been at Shakespeare's elbow, he could have given valuable advice; scarce
one who did not know off-hand that there was never a seaport in
Bohemia,--as if Shakespeare's world were one which Mercator could have
projected; scarce one but was satisfied that his ten finger-tips were a
sufficient key to those astronomic wonders of poise and counterpoise, of
planetary law and cometary seeming-exception, in his metres; scarce one
but thought he could gauge like an ale-firkin that intuition whose edging
shallows may have been sounded, but whose abysses, stretching down amid
the sunless roots of Being and Consciousness, mock the plummet; scarce
one but could speak with condescending approval of that prodigious
intelligence so utterly without congener that our baffled language must
coin an adjective to qualify it, and none is so audacious as to say
Shakesperian of any other.
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