It is pretty certain, however that no person on the globe, at the period of his life, had any _just_ appreciation of him. Notwithstanding the triumphant success of his career, and the high honor and opulence he attained, his real character, as such a mighty patriarch of literature, was not dreamed of either by himself or any of his contemporaries. As a mind impregnated with a fire nearly beyond the mortal sphere—as one whose birth was an event in which mankind were personally interested—who was to give a name to his age—who, at that point of his posthumous celebrity where other great men begin to recede into the shadows of the past, was to start up anew, in more living distinctness and intellectual splendor—was to pass in this apotheoside grandeur over the usually impenetrable barriers of nations and languages, and to become (like some of the universal and ever-enduring elements of nature—like light, fire or air) a constant pleasure and nutriment to the human mind—as this extraordinary, and, I may say, _mysterious_ being—no one knew him. His _full_ brightness was veiled not only from his contemporary friends and admirers, but, as is now universally acknowledged, from many of his most distinguished subsequent editors and commentators. The rapturous eulogies, the commendatory verses, the folios on folios written upon him—extravagant as they are—fall short of his _true_ value. Even Johnson, Warburton, Theobald, Pope, and the rest of his commentators of the same rank, appear to have meted out to him less than the deserved measure of praise. It appears that the _comparative_ smallness of their minds (I mean comparative with Shakspeare’s) did not permit them to comprehend the complete dimensions of the subject they had undertaken. They have all too much the air of critics, instead of humble followers and pupils. They assume a familiarity with him which their relative nature did not warrant. There is a greater difference between him and any one who has lived with him or subsequent to him, considered as two _minds_, than is always understood by those who even confine themselves to panegyric.