Holiness--to Lear or Othello--or to the Paradise Lost! Who does not instantly feel that he has been summoned to conceive and to contemplate all that is mighty, august, affecting, or terrible in our souls? That he looks into the caverned abyss where the Spirits of Power walk? Even as when, by the side of Anchises, Æneas beholds in pre-existence the assemblage of his kingly descendants, whom their day and the upper air will call to rule the nations with sovereignty, to impose the conditions of peace, to spare the vanquished, and with war to bring down the proud. LEAR! The minstrels chanted an ancient rude lay--the infant stage brought a rude drama--TO SHAKSPEARE. But long before Minstrel or Theatre--had mother, or grandam, or nurse told to the weeping or shuddering, to the burning or auguring Child, that relique of old memory, that domestic tragedy of the antique British throne--the story attracting and torturing of the Father-king who divided his heart and his realm to the two serpents, who cast out from heart and realm the Dove of his blood--till Time unveiled Truth and Love. _Then and there_ was the seed, the slowly-springing, laid in the deep and kindly soil. From that hour dates the Lear of Shakspeare. Why repeat things that we all know, and have a thousand times said? Because they must be reasserted explicitly, as often as they are implicitly gainsayed; and is it not gainsaying them to affirm that the Poet sings _to please_, when indeed he sings because this Infinite of knowledges--this accumulation of experiences--this world of sensibilities and sympathies, of affections, passions, emotions, desires of his own and of other men's, inspires him, and will form itself in words? But he looks towards his hoped Auditors with a more direct selfish desire or design. He must have from them the meed of all glorious deeds--the wreath of all glorious doers--FAME. Let Grateful Mankind applaud the Benefactors of Mankind. Ay, he loves life. He would fain live beyond this world, wide as it is, of his own particular bosom--he would live in the bosoms of his contemporaries, and in the bosoms of the generations that are to follow for evermore. Proud as privileged, he asks his due--RECOGNITION. And who that has the ability to render will choose or dare to withhold the tribute? Fame! the nectarean cup--the ambrosial fruit--that confers _Immortality_! The last best gift that mortals affect to bestow on their fellow-mortals. He who, at some great crisis, achieves a deed which the world shall feel, and whereof the world shall ring--dilates, in consciousness, to comprehend those whom his act shall reach, and those to whom it shall resound. Remember Lord Nelson at Trafalgar--in the moment ere the first gun fires, the word signalled to the awaiting host throughout the Fleet--"ENGLAND EXPECTS." In an instant, the twenty-five millions of compatriot islanders, as if wafted by the winds from their distant homes, are _there_--spectators