"It is not uncommon to excuse such deviations from historical propriety by saying, that if the mere accidents have been neglected, the essential humanity has been only more fully realized: and those who quarrel with the neglect are stigmatized as pedants having no eyes except for the external. We think, however, that it will be found, in most cases where the plea is set up, that the humanity for which the sacrifice has been made is equally external with that which has been disregarded, and much more commonplace and conventional; being in fact, only the outer life of existing society. We are met, of course, by the triumphant answer that Shakspeare wrote Roman plays with a very slender knowledge of the classics. It would be sufficient to reply, that we are speaking of cases where ignorance of antiquity is not counterbalanced by any very exuberant or profound knowledge of human nature. Possibly posterity may have to deal with another myriad-minded dramatist whose poverty is better than other men's riches; but it must not be rashly presumed that he is likely to appear at all; or, if at all, with the same deficiency of learning which was not unnatural three hundred years back. Meanwhile, it is a perverse and pernicious paradox to maintain that Shakspeare's consummate genius was in any way connected with his 'little Latin and less Greek,' or that he might not have portrayed the Romans yet more successfully if he had known more about them. Believing this, we are not presuming, as the same absurd reasoning would have it, to set up ourselves against him. We do not say that any other man in his age or our own, however great his command of learning, could possibly mend those plays by touching them; but we say that Shakspeare himself, with increased knowledge, might have made them yet more perfect. It is easy to oppose inspiration to scholastic culture; to coin antitheses between nature and art; and to say that Shakspeare's Romans are more ideally true than Niebuhr's. There is some truth in all this; but it is not to the purpose. A poet like Burns may have really known more of classical life than a critic like Blair; nay, it may be that if Keats or Tennyson had been a senior medallist at Cambridge, they would not have produced any thing not only so beautiful but so purely Greek as _Endymion_ or _Oenone_. In what we were just saying we were thinking of the very highest minds. And, when we recollect how gracefully Milton could walk under the weight of his immense learning, we need not fear that the Alantean shoulders of Shakspeare would have been oppressed by a similar load. The knowledge of antiquity may operate on the recipient so as to produce mere bookishness and intellectual sophistication; but in itself it is a real and legitimate part of all knowledge, a portion of that truth with which poets are conversant, a lesson set in other schools than those where man is teacher. We know not what were Shakspeare's