It is for their poetical qualities, for their gleams of imagination, for their quaint and subtle fancies, for their tender sentiment, and for their charm of diction that these old playwrights are worth reading. They are the best comment also to convince us of the immeasurable superiority of Shakespeare. Several of them, moreover, have been very inadequately edited, or not at all, which is perhaps better; and it is no useless discipline of the wits, no unworthy exercise of the mind, to do our own editing as we go along, winning back to its cradle the right word for the changeling the printers have left in his stead, making the lame verses find their feet again, and rescuing those that have been tumbled higgledy-piggledy into a mire of prose. A strenuous study of this kind will enable us better to understand many a faulty passage in our Shakespeare, and to judge of the proposed emendations of them, or to make one to our own liking. There is no better school for learning English, and for learning it when, in many important respects, it was at its best. I am not sure that I shall not seem to talk to you of many things that seem trivialities if weighed in the huge business scales of life, but I am always glad to say a word in behalf of what most men consider useless, and to say it the rather because it has so few friends. I have observed, and am sorry to have observed, that English poetry, at least in its older examples, is less read now than when I was young. I do not believe this to be a healthy symptom, for poetry frequents and keeps habitable those upper chambers of the mind that open toward the sun’s rising. II MARLOWE