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 Shakspeare 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 Shakspeare'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 Shakspeare'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 Shakspearian of any
other. And yet, in the midst of our impatience, we cannot help thinking
also of how much healthy mental activity this one man has been the
occasion, how much good he has indirectly done to society by withdrawing
men to investigations and habits of thought that secluded them from
baser attractions, for how many he has enlarged the circle of study and
reflection; since there is nothing in history or politics, nothing in
art or science, nothing in physics or metaphysics, that is not sooner or
later taxed for his illustration.
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