MEMOIR OF SHAKESPEARE

Summary

It may be safely asserted that the prince of British biographers could not, under any circumstances, have written a life of Shakespeare that would have been comparable with that wonderful achievement of personal history which stands unique in our language, the life of Johnson. Gentle, modest, and retiring, “the great heir of fame” would have been no hero after its eccentric writer's heart. But the man who could have worthily played the Boswell to Shakespeare, might have placed himself for ever amongst our principal literary creditors, and performed a work “which the world would not willingly let die.”

We are, however, so far from possessing such a treasure that we know, directly from his contemporaries, nothing of Shakespeare's biography. Strange, indeed, that in an age of great men, “when learning triumphed o'er her barbarous foes,” no one seems to have troubled himself to place on record any account of the man whose immortality they foresaw, and whose genius they confessed—

“To be such As neither Man, nor Muse, can praise too much.”

And the strange circumstance is the more deeply to be regretted as we ponder on the treasury of wit and wisdom which might then have made us rich indeed.