individual genius; but greatness like theirs is never more than the highest degree of an excellence which prevails widely round it, and forms the environment in which it grows.  No single mind in single contact with the facts of nature could have created out of itself a Pallas, a Madonna, or a Lear; such vast conceptions are the growth of ages, the creations of a nation’s spirit; and artist and poet, filled full with the power of that spirit, have but given them form, and nothing more than form.  Nor would the form itself have been attainable by any isolated talent.  No genius can dispense with experience; the aberrations of power, unguided or ill-guided, are ever in proportion to its intensity, and life is not long enough to recover from inevitable mistakes.  Noble conceptions already existing, and a noble school of execution which will launch mind and hand at once upon their true courses, are indispensable to transcendent excellence; and Shakspeare’s plays were as much the offspring of the long generations who had pioneered his road for him, as the discoveries of Newton were the offspring of those of Copernicus.

No great general ever arose out of a nation of cowards; no great statesman or philosopher out of a nation of fools; no great artist out of a nation of materialists; no great dramatist except when the drama was the passion of the people.  Acting was the especial amusement of the English, from the palace to the village green.  It was the result and expression of their power over themselves, and power over circumstances.  They were troubled with no subjective speculations; no social problems vexed them with which they were unable to deal; and in the exuberance of vigour and spirits they were able, in the strict and literal sense of the word, to play with the materials of life.  The mystery plays came first; next the popular legends; and then the great figures of English history came out upon the stage, or stories from Greek and Roman writers; or sometimes it was an extemporised allegory.  Shakspeare himself has left us many pictures of the village drama.  Doubtless he had seen many a Bottom in the old Warwickshire hamlets; many a Sir Nathaniel playing “Alissander,” and finding himself “a little o’erparted.”  He had been with Snug the joiner, Quince the carpenter, and Flute the bellows-mender, when a boy we will not question, and acted with them, and written their parts for them; had gone up with them in the winter’s evenings to the Lucy’s Hall before the sad trouble with the deer-stealing; and afterwards, when he came to London and found his way into great society, he had not failed to see Polonius burlesquing Caesar on the stage, as in his proper person Polonius burlesqued Sir William Cecil.  The strolling players in Hamlet might be met at every country wake or festival; it was the direction in which the especial genius of the people delighted to revel.  As I desire in this chapter not only to relate what were the habits of