How perfect his style is may be judged from the fact that it
never curdles into mannerism, and thus absolutely eludes imitation.
Though here, if anywhere, the style is the man, yet it is noticeable
only, like the images of Brutus, by its absence, so thoroughly is he
absorbed in his work, while he fuses thought and word indissolubly
together, till all the particles cohere by the best virtue of each. With
perfect truth he has said of himself that he writes
"All one, ever the same,
Putting invention in a noted weed,
That every word doth almost tell his name."
And yet who has so succeeded in imitating him as to remind us of him by
even so much as the gait of a single verse?[127] Those magnificent
crystallizations of feeling and phrase, basaltic masses, molten and
interfused by the primal fires of passion, are not to be reproduced by
the slow experiments of the laboratory striving to parody creation with
artifice. Mr. Matthew Arnold seems to think that Shakespeare has damaged
English poetry. I wish he had! It is true he lifted Dryden above himself
in "All for Love"; but it was Dryden who said of him, by instinctive
conviction rather than judgment, that within his magic circle none dared
tread but he.
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