first-rate importance is into good authors and bad ones a literary, not a moral distinction. But other classifications have their use. There are,

for example, personal authors and impersonal ones. A personal author is not necessarily one who babbles to his readers about himself and his belongings, his likes and dislikes, but he is one whose spirit hovers and broods over his own page; with whose treatise is bound up a living thing. Take an author about whom Mr. Bagehot has written with deep feeling and great acumen, the sombre spirit who composed The Analogy of Religion and preached the Fifteen Sermons. As Mr. Bagehot has observed, there is no positive direct evidence that Bishop Butler ever spoke to anybody all his life through, except on two occasions to Queen Caroline.1 You cannot guess what books he had in his library, for he hardly ever makes a quotation. "No man," says Mr. Bagehot, "would ever guess from Butler's writings that he ever had the disposal of five pounds. It is odd to think what he did with the mining profits and landed property, the royalties and rectories, coal-dues and curacies, that he must have heard of from morning to night." And yet this reticence and deep shadow of seclusiveness has not availed to hide from the sympathetic reader-despite, too, the clouded difficult style; for, again to quote Bagehot, "Butler, so far from having the pleasures of eloquence, had not even the comfort of perspicuity "-a strong, permanent, personal impression of an entirely honest

I am not sure that Mr. Bagehot ever made this observation. If he did it is not quite accurate, for in the Dictionary of National Biography the Bishop has at least three remarks attributed to him.

thinker. I feel far more certain that I know what manner of man Butler was, than I do about Saint Augustine, for all his fine Confessions.

Mr. Bagehot was a personal author, though he tells us very little directly about himself.

Now, I am going to begin quoting in real earnest. In the year 1853 Bagehot, who was then twentyseven years of age, had the courage, for his was a dauntless spirit, to write an essay on Shakespeare; not on his plays, nor on his characters, nor on his sonnets, nor on his investments, but on himself -on Shakespeare. To be able to write a good essay on Shakespeare is in my opinion the best possible test of an English man of letters. Had we an Academy and an examination for admission, no other demand need be made. But who should be the examiners?

Mr. Bagehot began his essay by boldly asserting that it is quite possible to know Shakespeare, and then proceeds:

Some extreme sceptics, we know, doubt if it is possible to deduce anything as to an author's character from his works. Yet surely people do not keep a tame steam-engine to write their books, and if these books were really written by a man, he must have been a man who could write them; he must have had the thoughts which they express, have acquired the knowledge they contain, have possessed the style in which we read them. The difficulty is a defect of the critics. A person who knows nothing of an author he has read will not know much of an author he has seen.

First of all, it may be said that Shakespeare's works could only be produced by a first-rate imagination working on a first-rate experience. It is often difficult to make out whether the author of a poetic creation is drawing from fancy or drawing from experience; but for art on a certain scale the two must concur. Out of nothing nothing can be created. Some plastic power is required, however great may be the material. And when such a work as Hamlet or Othello, still more when both of them and others not unequal have been

created by a single mind, it may be fairly said that not only a great imagination, but a full conversancy with the world, was necessary to their production. The whole powers of man under the most favourable circumstances are not too great for such an effort. We may assume that Shakespeare had a great experience.

To a great experience one thing is essential, an experiencing nature. It is not enough to have opportunity, it is essential to feel it. Some occasions come to all men; but to many they are of little use, and to some they are none. What, for example, has experience done for the distinguished Frenchman, the name of whose essay is prefixed to this paper? M. Guizot is the same man that he was in 1820, or, we believe, as he was in 1814. Take up one of his lectures, published before he was a practical statesman; you will be struck with the width of view, the amplitude and the solidity of the reflections; you will be amazed that a mere literary teacher could produce anything so wise. But take up afterwards an essay published since his fall, and you will be amazed to find no more. Napoleon the First is come and gone, the Bourbons of the old regime have come and gone, the Bourbons of the new regime have had their turn. M. Guizot has been first minister of a citizen king; he has led a great party; he has pronounced many a great discours that was well received by the second elective assembly in the world. But there is no trace of this in his writings. No one would guess from them that their author had ever left the professor's chair. It is the same, we are told, with small matters; when M. Guizot walks the street he seems to see nothing; the head is thrown back, the eye fixed, and the mouth working. His mind is no doubt at work, but it is not stirred by what is external. Perhaps it is the internal activity of mind that overmasters the perceptive power. Anyhow, there might have been an émeute in the street and he would not have known it; there have been revolutions in his life, and he is scarcely the wiser. Among the most frivolous and fickle of civilised nations he is alone. They pass from the game of war to the game of peace, from the game of science to the game of art, from the game of liberty to the game of slavery, from the game of slavery to the game of licence. He stands like a schoolmaster in the playground, without sport and without pleasure, firm and sullen, slow and awful (Literary Studies, vol. i., pp. 126–128).

From this quotation we take away the notion of an experiencing nature. Shakespeare had what Guizot (it appears) had not, an experiencing nature.

I will now take up Bagehot's essay on Macaulay,

written in 1856, when the great History was volume by volume taking the town by storm. It is easier to write well about Macaulay than about Shakespeare, but perhaps it is not so very easy, though it is no longer personally dangerous. I need not premise that Bagehot had an enormous admiration for Macaulay, who supplied him with what a few men love better than their dinner, intellectual entertainment. But Bagehot was a critic, and he writes:

Macaulay has exhibited many high attainments, many dazzling talents, much singular and well-trained power; but the quality which would most strike the observers of the interior man is what may be called his inexperiencing nature. Men of genius are in general distinguished by their extreme susceptibility to external experience. Finer and softer than other men, every exertion of their will, every incident of their lives, influences them more deeply than it would others. Their essence is at once finer and more impressible; it receives a distincter mark, and receives it more easily than the souls of the herd. From a peculiar sensibility the man of genius bears the stamp of life commonly more clearly than his fellows; even casual associations make a deep impression on him: examine his mind, and you may discern his fortunes. Macaulay has nothing of this. You could not tell what he has been. His mind shows no trace of change. What he is, he was; and what he was, he is. He early attained a high development, but he has not increased it since; years have come, but they have whispered little; as was said of the second Pitt, "He never grew, he was cast." The volume of speeches which he has published place the proof of this in every man's hand. His first speeches are as good as his last, his last scarcely richer than his first. He came into public life at an exciting season; he shared of course in that excitement, and the same excitement still quivers in his mind. He delivered marvellous rhetorical exercises on the Reform Bill when it passed; he speaks of it with rhetorical interest even now. He is still the man of '32. From that era he looks on the past.

All this was very natural at the moment. Nothing could be more probable than that a young man of the greatest talents, entering at once into important life at a conspicuous opportunity, should exaggerate its importance; he would fancy it was the crowning achievement," the greatest "in

the tide of time." But the singularity is that he should retain the idea now; that years have brought no influence, experience no change. The events of twenty years have been full of rich instruction on the events of twenty years ago, but they have not instructed him. His creed is a fixture. It is the same on his peculiar topic-on India. Before he went there he made a speech on the subject; Lord Canterbury, who must have heard a million speeches, said it was the best he had ever heard. It is difficult to fancy that so much vivid knowledge could be gained from books, from horrible Indian treatises, that such imaginative mastery should be possible without actual experience. Not forgetting, or excepting, the orations of Burke, it was perhaps as remarkable a speech as was ever made on India by an Englishman who had not been in India. Now he has been there he speaks no better, rather worse; he spoke excellently without experience, he speaks no better with it; if anything, it rather puts him out. His speech on the Indian charter a year or two ago was not finer than that on the charter of 1833. Before he went to India he recommended that writers should be examined in the classics; after being in India he recommended that they should be examined in the same way. He did not say that he had seen the place in the meantime; he did not think that had anything to do with it. You could never tell from any difference in his style what he had seen, or what he had not seen. He is so insensible to passing objects that they leave no distinctive mark, no intimate peculiar trace.

Such a man would naturally think literature more instructive than life. Hazlitt said of Mackintosh, "He might like to read an account of India; but India itself, with its burning, shining face, was a mere blank, an endless waste to him. Persons of this class have no more to say to a plain matter of fact staring them in the face, than they have to say to a hippopotamus." This was a keen criticism on Sir James, savouring of the splenetic mind from which it came. As a complete estimate it would be a most unjust one of Macaulay, but we know that there is a whole class of minds which prefers the literary delineation of objects to the actual eyesight of them (Literary Studies, vol. ii., pp. 224-226).

I do not stop to ask whether we ought to agree with this criticism or not, for I have only made use of it to emphasise my earlier quotations, and to make plainer what I mean when, borrowing, as I am now able to do, Bagehot's own words, I say of him, that he most surely had an experiencing