or Othello, was thinking of any thing but Lear and Othello?  Or that Mr. Kean, when he plays these characters, is thinking of the audience?—­No:  he who would be great in the eyes of others, must first learn to be nothing in his own.  The love of fame, as it enters at times into his mind, is only another name for the love of excellence; or it is the ambition to attain the highest excellence, sanctioned by the highest authority—­that of time.

Those minds, then, which are the most entitled to expect it, can best put up with the postponement of their claims to lasting fame.  They can afford to wait.  They are not afraid that truth and nature will ever wear out; will lose their gloss with novelty, or their effect with fashion.  If their works have the seeds of immortality in them, they will live; if they have not, they care little about them as theirs.  They do not complain of the start which others have got of them in the race of everlasting renown, or of the impossibility of attaining the honours which time alone can give, during the term of their natural lives.  They know that no applause, however loud and violent, can anticipate or over-rule the judgment of posterity; that the opinion of no one individual, nor of any one generation, can have the weight, the authority (to say nothing of the force of sympathy and prejudice), which must belong to that of successive generations.  The brightest living reputation cannot be equally imposing to the imagination, with that which is covered and rendered venerable with the hoar of innumerable ages.  No modern production can have the same atmosphere of sentiment around it, as the remains of classical antiquity.  But then our moderns may console themselves with the reflection, that they will be old in their turn, and will either be remembered with still increasing honours, or quite forgotten!

I would speak of the living poets as I have spoken of the dead (for I think highly of many of them); but I cannot speak of them with the same reverence, because I do not feel it; with the same confidence, because I cannot have the same authority to sanction my opinion.  I cannot be absolutely certain that any body, twenty years hence, will think any thing about any of them; but we may be pretty sure that Milton and Shakspeare will be remembered twenty years hence.  We are, therefore, not without excuse if we husband our enthusiasm a little, and do not prematurely lay out our whole stock in untried ventures, and what may turn out to be false bottoms.  I have myself out-lived one generation of favourite poets, the Darwins, the Hayleys, the Sewards.  Who reads them now?—­If, however, I have not the verdict of posterity to bear me out in bestowing the most unqualified praises on their immediate successors, it is also to be remembered, that neither does it warrant me in condemning them.  Indeed, it was not my wish to go into this ungrateful part of the subject; but something of the sort is expected