adornment, which emanated from the court, and against which satire was directed by Shakspere in the character of Osric in Hamlet." So much for the critic's admission of Shakspere's dependence on the associations of his age, with which of course we have no fault to find save its inadequacy. In treating the matter thus, Coleridge is aware that he is "only palliating the practice of Shakspere; he ought to have had nothing to do with merely temporary peculiarities; he wrote not for his own only, but for all ages." So far his conceits must be regarded as defects; "they detract sometimes from his universality as to time, person, and situation."[1] But the critic has already made the conceits and puns of Shakspere "natural"[2] or universally proper; the latter, he tells us, "often arise out of a mingled sense of injury, and contempt of the person inflicting it, and as it seems to me, it is a natural way of expressing that mixed feeling." Self-contradiction is likewise the fate of Carlyle's Platonism; he, too, in spite of a display of the mystic universal worthy of Novalis, is compelled to admit, for example, that "Dante knows accurately and well what lies close to him; but in such a time, without printed books or free intercourse, he could not know well what was distant." Miserable fall! for one who writes above space and time to depend on the printer's "devil" or the telegraph-clerk. But even the author of Heroes and Hero-Worship allows that "Dante does not come before us as a large Catholic mind, rather as a narrow and even sectarian mind," and that this narrowness is at least "partly the fruit of his age and position"—an opinion which any one who compares the social life of Italy in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries with the Divina Commedia will heartily endorse.
- ↑ Lectures and Notes on Shakespere (ed. T. Ashe), p. 93.
- ↑ Ib., p. 73.
