"
Above all, he becomes not merely an expositor, permanently valuable, but
for Englishmen almost the discoverer of the old English drama. "The book
is such as I am glad there should be," he modestly says of the
_Specimens of English Dramatic Poets who lived about the time of
Shakespeare_; to which, however, he adds in a series of notes the very
quintessence of criticism, the choicest savour and perfume of
Elizabethan poetry being sorted, and stored here, with a sort of
delicate intellectual epicureanism, which has had the effect of winning
for these, then almost forgotten, poets, one generation after another of
enthusiastic students. Could he but have known how fresh a source of
culture he was evoking there for other generations, through all those
years in which, a little wistfully, he would harp on the limitation of
his time by business, and sigh for a better fortune in regard to
literary opportunities!
To feel strongly the charm of an old poet or moralist, the literary
charm of Burton, for instance, or Quarles, or The Duchess of Newcastle;
and then to interpret that charm, to convey it to others--he seeming to
himself but to hand on to others, in mere humble ministration, that of
which for them he is really the creator--this is the way of his
criticism; cast off in a stray letter often, or passing note, or
lightest essay or conversation.
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