Diderot does not recast Bayle; Beaumarchais does not copy Plautus, and has no need of Davus to create Figaro. Piranesi is not inspired by Dædalus. Isaiah does not begin Moses over again. One day, at St. Helena, M. De Las Cases said, "Sire, when you were master of Prussia, I would in your place have taken the sword of Frederick the Great, which is deposited in the tomb at Potsdam; and I would have worn it." "Fool!" replied Napoleon, "I had my own." Shakespeare's work is absolute, sovereign, imperious, eminently solitary, unneighbourly, sublime in radiance, absurd in reflection, and must remain without a copy. To imitate Shakespeare would be as insane as to imitate Racine would be stupid. CHAPTER VI. Let us agree, by the way, respecting a qualificative much used everywhere: _Profanum vulgus_,--the saying of a poet on which pedants lay great stress. This _profanum vulgus_ is rather the weapon of everybody. Let us fix the meaning of this word. What is the _profanum vulgus?_ The school says, "It is the people." And we, we say, "It is the school." But let us first define this expression, "the school." When we say, "the school," what must be understood? Let us explain it. The school is the resultant of pedantry; the school is the literary excrescence of the budget; the school is intellectual mandarinship governing in the various authorized and official teachings, either of the press or of the State, from the theatrical _feuilleton_ of the prefecture to the biographies and encyclopædias duly examined, stamped, and hawked about, and sometimes, as a refinement, made by republicans agreeable to the police; the school is the circumvallating classic and scholastic orthodoxy, the Homeric and Virgilian antiquity made use of by _literati_ licensed by government,--a kind of China self-called Greece; the school is--summed up in one concretion which forms part of public order--all the knowledge of pedagogues, all the history of historiographers, all the poetry of laureates, all the philosophy of sophists, all the criticism of pedants, all the ferule of the "ignorantins," all the religion of bigots, all the modesty of prudes, all the metaphysics of those who change sides, all the justice of placemen, all the old age of the small young men who have undergone the operation, all the flattery of courtiers, all the diatribes of censer-bearers, all the independence of valets, all the certainty of short sights and of base souls. The school hates Shakespeare. It detects him in the very act of mingling with the people, going to and fro in public thoroughfares, "trivial," speaking the language of the people, uttering the human cry like any other man, welcome to those that he welcomes, applauded by hands black with tar, cheered by all the hoarse throats that proceed from labour and weariness. The drama of Shakespeare is the people; the school is indignant and says, "Odi profanum vulgus." There is demagogy in this poetry roaming at large;