In the eighteenth century the persistent raillery of Voltaire ended in producing in England a certain waking up. Garrick, while correcting Shakespeare, played him, and acknowledged that it was Shakespeare that he played. They reprinted him at Glasgow. An imbecile, Malone, made commentaries on his plays, and as a logical sequence, whitewashed his tomb. There was on this tomb a little bust, of a doubtful resemblance, and moderate as a work of art; but, what made it a subject of reverence, contemporaneous with Shakespeare. It is after this bust that all the portraits of Shakespeare have been made that we now see. The bust was whitewashed. Malone, critic and whitewasher of Shakespeare, spread a coat of plaster on his face, of idiotic nonsense on his work. BOOK II. MEN OF GENIUS. CHAPTER I. Great Art, using this word in its arbitrary sense, is the region of Equals. Before going farther, let us fix the value of this expression, Art, which often recurs in our writing. We speak of Art as we speak of Nature; here are two terms of an almost unlimited signification. To pronounce the one or the other of these words, Nature, Art, is to make a conjuration, to extract from the depths the ideal, to draw aside one of the two grand curtains of a divine creation. God manifests himself to us in the first degree through the life of the universe, and in the second through the thought of man. The second manifestation is not less holy than the first. The first is named Nature, the second is named Art. Hence this reality: the poet is a priest There is here below a pontiff,--it is genius. _Sacerdos Magnus._ Art is the second branch of Nature. Art is as natural as Nature. By the word _God_--let us fix the sense of this word--we mean the Living Infinite. The I latent of the Infinite patent, that is God. God is the Invisible seen. The world concentrated is God. God expanded, is the world. We, who are speaking, we believe in nothing out of God. That being said, let us proceed. God creates art by man. He has for a tool the human intellect. This tool the Workman has made for himself; he has no other. Forbes, in the curious little work perused by Warburton and lost by Garrick, affirms that Shakespeare devoted himself to the practice of magic, that magic was in his family, and that what little good there was in his pieces was dictated to him by one "Alleur," a spirit. Let us say on this point, for we must not avoid any of the questions about to arise, that it is a wretched error of all ages to desire to give the human intellect assistance from without,--_antrum adjuvat vatem._ To the work which seems superhuman, people wish to bring the intervention of the extra-human,--in antiquity, the tripod; in our days, the table. The table is nothing but the tripod come back. To accept _au pied de la lettre_ the demon that Socrates talks of, the thicket of Moses, the nymph of Numa, the spirit of Plotinus, and Mahomet's dove, is to be the victim of a metaphor.