which is therein revealed, tempted mo into my previous remarks as to the private life of the poet.
The want of more accurate information as to Shakespeare's life is readily explained when we recall the political and religious storms which burst wildly out soon after his death—calling forth for a time an absolute Puritan dominion, which long after had a cold, deadening influence, and not only destroyed the golden age of Elizabethan literature, but brought it into absolute oblivion. When in the beginning of the last century the works of Shakespeare again came to the full light of day, all traditions which could aid in analysing the text were utterly wanting, and commentators were obliged to take refuge in a criticism which drew from superficial empiricism, and a more lamentable materialism, their last dregs. With the exception of William Hazlitt, England has given us no commentator of any consequence; in all the works of all the others we find only petty huckstering of trifles, self-reflecting shallowness, enthusiastic mysticism, pedantic puffed-upness which threatens to burst for joy, when they can convict the poor poet of an antiquarian, geographical, or chronological error, and thereby bewail that he unfortunately did not study the ancients in the original tongues, and had thereunto but little schooling. He makes
