abundant argument against it during this late study of Hamlet. In the streets, saloons, and lecture rooms we continually hear comments so stupid, insolent, and shallow on great and beautiful works, that we are tempted to think that there is no public for anything that is good; that a work of genius can appeal only to the fewest minds in any one age, and that the reputation now awarded to those of former times is never felt, but only traditional. Of Shakespeare, so vaunted a name, little wise or worthy has been written, perhaps nothing so adequate as Coleridge's comparison of him to the pine-apple; yet on reading Hamlet, his greatest work, we find there is not a pregnant sentence, scarce a word that men have not appreciated, have not used in myriad ways. Had we never read the play, we should find the whole of it from quotation and illustration as familiar to us as air. The exquisite phraseology, so heavy with meaning, wrought out with such admirable minuteness, has become a part of literary diction, the stock of the literary bank; and what set criticism can tell like this fact how great was the work, and that men were worthy it should be addressed to them?”[1]
In this conversation, as in all the imaginary conversations which were so in fashion at that period, there are traces of Landor; but Margaret Fuller achieved, both in “Aglauron and Laurie,” and in “The Two Herberts,” what Landor rarely accomplished — what Lowell could not achieve in his “Conversations on the Dramatists,” or her other fellow-townsman, Story, in his more recent “He and She,” — the distinct individualization of
- ↑ Papers on Literature and Art, p. 173.
