If none can deny it, then it was his lack of ambition for academic honours, his choice that led him to pursue other studies than the dead languages, which caused him to yield, as Schlegel says of him, to "the general direction of his inclination not towards the collection of words but of facts." Thus we come to the other question,—was his choice wise or unwise? To answer this, I know of no better process than that of again confronting him with Ben Jonson. It is true they stand at an immeasurable distance from each other; but it is not requisite here to place their merits in competition. It will, I am aware, be impossible to prove that Shakespeare would have been better or worse, if qualified for Master of Arts; but the bare notion of such a consummation is awful. If the necessary consequence would have been, with him, to give translations from the ancients; to treat us in a tragedy with an oration of three hundred and thirty-seven lines, as we find in Cataline, purely because it was the identical oration of Cicero; or, in a comedy, with a tedious paraphrase of one of Horace's satires; if it would have filled him with so much pedantry as to make him insist on applause exactly in proportion to his imitation of the classics; and to bring on the stage a Grex, in order to explain his meaning and profound erudition to the untutored multitude; if, in short, he would have been induced to sacrifice his own thoughts, his own poetry, and his own wisdom, to the thoughts, poetry, and wisdom of Athens and Rome; then I unhesitatingly declare my thankfulness that he was not so learned as Ben Jonson, or rather as he is considered to have been. More learning might possibly have distorted his genius, but could it have improved it? Could it have added one jot to his knowledge of human nature; or of all that is in the natural world, or refined his art as a poet, or as a dramatist? And what is especially to the purpose, can we point out a passage in his works, wherein he has betrayed a deficiency in classic lore? Had there been any, how triumphantly would it have been laid before our eyes! I know of none; that is, none beyond the customary liberties of his age. It is a curious circumstance that passages in Ben Jonson have been exposed by his commentators as erroneous in translation, or faulty in classical knowledge; but, such is the value of a good character, they are of course ascribed to haste, oversight, or heedlessness, any thing rather than to ignorance in a Master of Arts. A saint may freely commit a sin, for which a sinner would be whipped. Every thing has its cause; and the unreasonable conduct of mankind is usually deducible from an unreasonable one, if our reason will stoop to trace it. Exactly in proportion to the admiration which Shakespeare's works enforced from contemporary classic students, was the humiliating distress that he had neither taken a degree nor studied at either of our Universities. It mattered not how great his studies had been elsewhere; they had not the legitimate stamp. Thence arose the absurd desire to place Ben Jonson above him,-if not in poetry, then in the classical conduct of his dramas, or in something which ought to please by authority, beyond mere nature, displayed with home-bred English art. No one, before Shakespeare, had dared to claim observance from the public as a poet, without his brow being bound with academic laurels. Excellence, without that distinction, was the more confounding as it was acknowledged by scholars themselves. His democratic genius rose superior to the aristocracy of learning. Those who had obtained a degree at Oxford or at Cambridge lost much of their importance; they were no longer in the only high road to fame. A death-blow was aimed at their exclusive admiration of the ancients. It was proved that the efforts of the human mind had not formerly found their limits; and mediocrity knew not whither to fly for an idol, pre-eminent in power, except where it was a heresy in classic faith to lift the eye. In this way I attempt to account for the existence of a pedantic party in his time, who seized on Ben Jonson as their chief; though neither they, nor far less the academic poet, could forbear yielding to the democratic power. Halfblinded by envy, they spoke of him at first as an upstart crow;" but, spreading his wings, he proved himself an eagle. 66 The same party, under different names, reappeared in the last century, all acknowledging his superiority, but seeking to deprive him of those honours, which they could not allow him to possess without pain to themselves; because the poet still remained a mighty evidence against their own factitious pretensions. They went a step farther than in his time,—declaring he was utterly unlearned. As Dryden wrote, "those who accuse him to have wanted learning, give him the greatest commendation." That they not only granted, but were willing to represent him like a being out of nature, an inconceivable prodigy, rather than confess that a man could learn any thing valuable, unless he had bowed for instruction before another man in a wig. Why did not these gentlemen speak in the same strain of Homer and the Greek tragedians? Had they authority for imagining those great poets were students of any but their native language? Did they flatter their self-love in believing that Homer must have taken out a diploma either in Attica or in Boeotia? The critics of the last century, like those at the close of the sixteenth, were interested parties in the discussion. Add to this, the levelling principle is strong within us. It may be observed that, with the exception of Upton and a few others, his greatest admirers, as a poet and philosopher, have been the first to attack, or the most remiss in defending, his learning. On the ground that learning is estimable, he must be deprived of it by the invidious; or a critic may be tempted to the task, because he will thereby have an excellent opportunity of displaying his own learning while he is straining to disprove that of Shakespeare. Thus he may, in one particular, fancy himself ranked above the greatest writer in the world; but so might an ass, because he can boast of four legs against the poet's two. But the chief cause, I am convinced, may be traced to Shakespeare's offensive disregard of a University degree. The controversy respecting the merits of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson was not, in their day, so much a question of which was the better scholar, but whose plays ought to be considered superior in plan and management; those founded on classic rules, embellished with translations or imitations; or those on pure English models, with sentiments of native growth. The public, including the best judges, plainly decided in favour of the latter. There is an anecdote, little known perhaps, though given in the annotations, taken from the Harleian MS. which I value, because I verily believe it genuine, for it bears the mark of Shakespeare's good-humoured punning raillery; and also because it proves that these two great rivals in the public favour, (though Ben was certainly sometimes angry) lived on the whole in a friendly manner together. It is necessary to understand that the custom was to present a god-child with a set of Apostle-spoons; and that latten, a word now out of use, is a sort of base metal. "Shakespeare was god-father to one of Ben Jonson's children, and after the christening, being in deep study, Jonson came to cheer him up, and asked him why he was so melancholy? 'No 'faith, Ben,' says he, not I! But I have been considering a great while what should be the fittest gift for me to bestow upon my god-child, and I have resolved at last.' 'I pr'ythee, what?' says he. I'faith, Ben, I'll give him a dozen good latten spoons, and thou shalt translate them.'" Some may mercifully imagine it was sufficiently severe to deprive Shakespeare of the modicum of Latin and Greek, which his rival had bestowed on him; but no, Dr. Farmer's severity could not stop there; he must needs strip him of French and Italian. His attempts with the Italian, and those of his coadjutors, have been already noticed. As there is much French |