Certainly, no writer among ourselves has shown either the same
enthusiastic admiration of his genius, or the same philosophical
acuteness in pointing out his characteristic excellences. As we have
pretty well exhausted all we had to say upon this subject in the
body of the work, we shall here transcribe Schlegel's general
account of Shakespeare, which is in the following words:
'Never, perhaps, was there so comprehensive a talent for the
delineation of character as Shakespeare's. It not only grasps the
diversities of rank, sex, and age, down to the dawnings of infancy;
not only do the king and the beggar, the hero and the pickpocket,
the sage and the idiot, speak and act with equal truth; not only
does he transport himself to distant ages and foreign nations, and
pourtray in the most accurate manner, with only a few apparent
violations of costume, the spirit of the ancient Romans, of the
French in their wars with the English, of the English themselves
during a great part of their history, of the Southern Europeans (in
the serious part of many comedies) the cultivated society of that
time, and the former rude and barbarous state of the North; his
human characters have not only such depth and precision that they
cannot be arranged under classes, and are inexhaustible, even in
conception:--no--this Prometheus not merely forms men, he opens the
gates of the magical world of spirits; calls up the midnight ghost;
exhibits before us his witches amidst their unhallowed mysteries;
peoples the air with sportive fairies and sylphs:--and these beings,
existing only in imagination, possess such truth and consistency,
that even when deformed monsters like Caliban, he extorts the
conviction, that if there should be such beings, they would so
conduct themselves.
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