What has he told us of
himself? In our self-exploiting nineteenth century, with its melancholy
liver-complaint, how serene and high he seems! If he had sorrows, he has
made them the woof of everlasting consolation to his kind; and if, as
poets are wont to whine, the outward world was cold to him, its biting
air did but trace itself in loveliest frost-work of fancy on the many
windows of that self-centred and cheerful soul.
Footnotes:
[119] As where Ben Jonson is able to say,--
"Man may securely sin, but safely never."
[120] "Vulgarem locutionem anpellamus cam qua infantes adsuefiunt ab
adsistentibus cum primitus distinguere voces incipiunt: vel, quod
brevius dici potest, vulgarem locutionem asserimus _quam sine omni
regula, nutricem imitantes accepimus_." Dantes, _de Vulg. Eloquio_,
Lib I. cap. i.
[121] Gray, himself a painful corrector, told Nicholls that "nothing
was done so well as at the first concoction,"--adding, as a reason,
"We think in words." Ben Jonson said, it was a pity Shakespeare had
not blotted more, for that he sometimes wrote nonsense,--and cited in
proof of it the verse,
"Caesar did never wrong but with just cause."
The last four words do not appear in the passage as it now stands,
and Professor Craik suggests that they were stricken out in
consequence of Jonson's criticism.
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