That sentence given nasally by a Coquelin to a theatre-full of People of the Middle-Class should convince also us of the Hither-North that flowers may blow in any season and be as various as multiplicity may. William Shakespeare, without all question and beyond any repining, is--or rather was--the first of our Poets, and was--or rather is--the first to-day. So that, with him for a well and the Jacobean Bible for a further spring of effort, our English Poets make up (“build” Milton called it) the sounding line. But William Shakespeare also is of us: he will have it on the surface or not at all; as a man hastening to beauty, too eager to delve by the way. And with it all how he succeeds! What grace and what appreciation in epithet, what subtle and sub-conscious effects of verb! What resonant and yet elusive diction! It is true Shakespeare, that line-- “Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May.” And that other-- “Or stoops with the Remover to remove.” And these are true Shakespeare because in each there is we know not what of ivory shod with steel. A mixture of the light and the strong, of the subtle and the intense rescues his simple words from oblivion. But another, not of our blood, would have hidden far more; he shows it all, frankly disdaining artifice. Also the great Elizabethan needs room for his giant limbs, for his frame of thought and his thews of diction. Cite him just too shortly, choose but a hair’s breadth too mickle an ensample of his work, and it is hardly Poesy, nay, hardly Prose. Thus you shall have Othello--the Moor they call him--betrayed and raging, full of an African Anger. What does he say of it? Why very much; but if you are of those that cut out their cameos too finely; you slip into quoting this merely:-- _Oth._ Hum! Hum! And that is not our Shakespeare at all, nor e’en our Othello. Oh! no, it is nothing but a brutish noise, meaning nothing, empty of tragedy, unwished for. It was Professor Goodle who said that “none needed the spaces of repose more than Shakespeare,” and taught us in these words that the poet must have hills and valleys; must recline if he is to rise. But does not Shakespeare, even in his repose, seem to create? The Professor will indeed quote to us the mere sprawling leisure of Stratford, and shame us with such lines as-- MAC.--The Devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon, Where got’st thou that goose look? Which is Shakespeare at full length. But we also, that are not over sure of Shakespeare’s failing, can answer him with such excerpts as these:--