On the other hand, unless we
admit certain principles as fixed beyond question, we shall be able to
render no adequate judgment, but only to record our impressions, which
may be valuable or not, according to the greater or less ductility of the
senses on which they are made. Charles Lamb, for example, came to the old
English dramatists with the feeling of a discoverer. He brought with him
an alert curiosity, and everything was delightful simply because it was
strange. Like other early adventurers, he sometimes mistook shining sand
for gold; but he had the great advantage of not feeling himself
responsible for the manners of the inhabitants he found there, and not
thinking it needful to make them square with any Westminster Catechism of
aesthetics. Best of all, he did not feel compelled to compare them with
the Greeks, about whom he knew little, and cared less. He took them as he
found them, described them in a few pregnant sentences, and displayed his
specimens of their growth, and manufacture. When he arrived at the
dramatists of the Restoration, so far from being shocked, he was charmed
with their pretty and unmoral ways; and what he says of them reminds us
of blunt Captain Dampier, who, in his account of the island of Timor,
remarks, as a matter of no consequence, that the natives "take as many
wives as they can maintain, and as for religion, they have none.
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