THE MIND OF SHAKESPERE
the beginning also there has been an adverse opinion of Shakspere's craft; if we are to believe the extreme criticism of him, he never revised his work, he was sometimes careless of his grammar, he was sometimes all but indifferent to dramatic structure. Though the volume of his fame has more or less overwhelmed all fault-finding, no sincere attempt to explain his mind will neglect to bring even the rumor of his defects to a final account.
The desirable explanation, therefore, will answer the question of his naturalness, the question of his comprehensiveness, the question of his imperfections. The well-known attempts to understand this elusive intellect have, however, usually busied themselves with only one or two of these aspects. Such a partial solution is in Hartley Coleridge's beautiful sonnet:
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