The other point is that recent attempts to make Shakespeare less titanic than tradition represents him are not soundly critical. Every reader knows that he is unequal in his inspiration and one can select lines and passages of no distinction. It is, moreover, a question if some of the plays which bear his name were really written by him. Take him as a whole, and in the essential qualities of the poet--which are the expression of things in beautiful images and exquisite little allegories and the use of language of a fitting tone--he surpasses every other poet. I have read at least something of Homer, Hesiod, Aeschylus, Euripides, Vergil, Horace, Dante, Tasso, Racine, Corneille, Calderon, Goethe, and Schiller in their own tongues, and that is my confident judgment. Some modern writers who attack Shakespeare’s supremacy cannot, apparently, read his rivals in the original. But Shakespeare requires a volume or nothing, and we will take him for granted as the first classic. Of Francis Bacon also we must say little. His chief works (_Novum Organon_, etc.) were written in Latin and belong to the history of thought, not of letters. His English _Essays_ may be considered a classic. Ben Jonson (1574-1637), finally, though called “rare Ben Jonson” in his time for his beautiful lyrics, pungent comedies, and classical tragedies, is now rarely read. English literature, in fact, now became a ceaseless and ever broadening stream, and, with all the interests of our modern literature, we have little time, unless we are special students, to read any but the supreme writers of the earlier days. The Authorized Version of the Bible itself is a wonderful monument of the artistic splendor of that age. Fifty divines, not poets, were set to prepare the translation, from 1605 to 1610, and, wherever the Hebrew text is itself poetic--the far greater part of it (Pentateuch, historical books, etc.) is not at all fine literature--they rendered it in magnificent, sonorous English. The _Anatomy of Melancholy_ by Robert Burton (1577-1640) and the _Religio Medici_ of Sir Thomas Browne, a distinguished physician (1605-82), may be selected as the best classics. After these we get poets like Vaughan and Herrick, who are scarcely great enough to be included here, and then John Milton (1608-74), the second greatest poet of the English tongue as well as a sound and deep thinker and a most learned man for his age.