No, he was not swamped by classicism, but he was affected by it, and just here, and in that self-consciousness which Shakespeare was free from, and which may have been more or less the result of his classic erudition, he fails of being one of the universal poets of mankind. The genius of Shakespeare lay in his power to so use the real and individual facts of life as to raise in the minds of his readers a broader and nobler conception of human life than they had conceived before. This is creative genius; this is the idealist dealing faithfully with realistic material; this is, as we should say in our day, the work of the artist as distinguished from the work of the photographer. It may be an admirable but it is not the highest work of the sculptor, the painter, or the writer, that does not reveal to the mind--that comes into relation with it something before out of his experience and beyond the facts either brought before him or with which he is acquainted. What influence Shakespeare had upon the culture and taste of his own time and upon his immediate audience would be a most interesting inquiry. We know what his audiences were. He wrote for the people, and the theatre in his day was a popular amusement for the multitude, probably more than it was a recreation for those who enjoyed the culture of letters. A taste for letters was prevalent among the upper class, and indeed was fashionable among both ladies and gentlemen of rank. In this the court of Elizabeth set the fashion. The daughter of the duchess was taught not only to distill strong waters, but to construe Greek. When the queen was translating Socrates or Seneca, the maids of honor found it convenient to affect at least a taste for the classics. For the nobleman and the courtier an intimacy with Greek, Latin, and Italian was essential to "good form." But the taste for erudition was mainly confined to the metropolis or the families who frequented it, and to persons of rank, and did not pervade the country or the middle classes. A few of the country gentry had some pretension to learning, but the majority cared little except for hawks and hounds, gaming and drinking; and if they read it was some old chronicle, or story of knightly adventure, "Amadis de Gaul," or a stray playbook, or something like the "History of Long Meg of Westminster," or perhaps a sheet of news. To read and write were still rare accomplishments in the country, and Dogberry expressed a common notion when he said reading and writing come by nature. Sheets of news had become common in the town in James's time, the first newspaper being the English Mercury, which appeared in April, 1588, and furnished food for Jonson's satire in his "Staple of News." His accusation has a familiar sound when he says that people had a "hunger and thirst after published pamphlets of news, set out every Saturday, but made all at home, and no syllable of truth in them."