‘A fool, a fool!—I met a fool i’ the forest, A motley fool!—a miserable world;— As I do live by food, I met a fool; Who laid him down and basked him in the sun, And railed on lady Fortune in good terms, In good set terms,—and yet a motley fool. “Good-morrow, fool,” quoth I: “No, sir,” quoth he, “Call me not fool, till heaven hath sent me fortune:” And then he drew a dial from his poke, And looking on it with lack-lustre eye, Says, very wisely, “It is ten o’clock: Thus may we see,” quoth he, “how the world wags; ’Tis but an hour ago since it was nine; And after an hour more,’twill be eleven; And so, from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe, And then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot, And thereby hangs a tale.” When I did hear The motley fool thus moral on the time, My lungs began to crow like chanticleer, That fools should be so deep-contemplative; And I did laugh, sans intermission, An hour by his dial.’ No slight versatility of mind and pliancy of fancy could pass at will from scenes such as these to the ward of Eastcheap and the society which heard the chimes at midnight. One of the reasons of the rarity of great imaginative works is that in very few cases is this capacity for musing solitude combined with that of observing mankind. A certain constitutional though latent melancholy is essential to such a nature. This is the exceptional characteristic in Shakespeare. All through his works you feel you are reading the popular author, the successful man; but through them all there is a certain tinge of musing sadness pervading, and, as it were, softening their gaiety. Not a trace can be found of ‘eating cares’ or narrow and mind-contracting toil, but everywhere there is, in addition to shrewd sagacity and buoyant wisdom, a refining element of chastening sensibility, which prevents sagacity from being rough, and shrewdness from becoming cold. He had an eye for either sort of life:— ‘Why, let the stricken deer go weep, The hart ungallèd play; For some must watch, and some must sleep, Thus runs the world away.’