for Boswell, he might have remained little more than a name.
Others there are who have bequeathed great works to posterity, but
of whose lives next to nothing is known. What would we not give
to have a Boswell's account of Shakspeare? We positively know
more of the personal history of Socrates, of Horace, of Cicero, of
Augustine, than we do of that of Shakspeare. We do not know what
was his religion, what were his politics, what were his
experiences, what were his relations to his contemporaries. The
men of his own time do not seem to have recognised his greatness;
and Ben Jonson, the court poet, whose blank-verse Shakspeare was
content to commit to memory and recite as an actor, stood higher
in popular estimation. We only know that he was a successful
theatrical manager, and that in the prime of life he retired to
his native place, where he died, and had the honours of a village
funeral. The greater part of the biography which has been
constructed respecting him has been the result, not of
contemporary observation or of record, but of inference. The best
inner biography of the man is to be found in his sonnets.

Men do not always take an accurate measure of their
contemporaries. The statesman, the general, the monarch of to-day
fills all eyes and ears, though to the next generation he may be
as if he had never been. "And who is king to-day?" the painter
Greuze would ask of his daughter, during the throes of the first
French Revolution, when men, great for the time, were suddenly
thrown to the surface, and as suddenly dropt out of sight again,
never to reappear. "And who is king to-day? After all," Greuze
would add, "Citizen Homer and Citizen Raphael will outlive those
great citizens of ours, whose names I have never before heard of."
Yet of the personal history of Homer nothing is known, and of