want of ’learning,’—­that is, of familiarity with the great writers of antiquity.  But nine-tenths of his defects are not, I believe, the errors of an inspired genius, ignorant of art, but the sins of a great but negligent artist.  He was often, no doubt, over-worked and pressed for time.  He knew that the immense majority of his audience were incapable of distinguishing between rough and finished work.  He often felt the degradation of having to live by pleasing them.  Probably in hours of depression he was quite indifferent to fame, and perhaps in another mood the whole business of play-writing seemed to him a little thing.  None of these thoughts and feelings influenced him when his subject had caught hold of him.  To imagine that then he ‘winged his roving flight’ for ‘gain’ or ‘glory,’ or wrote from any cause on earth but the necessity of expression, with all its pains and raptures, is mere folly.  He was possessed:  his mind must have been in a white heat:  he worked, no doubt, with the furia of Michael Angelo.  And if he did not succeed at once—­and how can even he have always done so?—­he returned to the matter again and again.  Such things as the scenes of Duncan’s murder or Othello’s temptation, such speeches as those of the Duke to Claudio and of Claudio to his sister about death, were not composed in an hour and tossed aside; and if they have defects, they have not what Shakespeare thought defects.  Nor is it possible that his astonishingly individual conceptions of character can have been struck out at a heat:  prolonged and repeated thought must have gone to them.  But of small inconsistencies in the plot he was often quite careless.  He seems to have finished off some of his comedies with a hasty and even contemptuous indifference, as if it mattered nothing how the people got married, or even who married whom, so long as enough were married somehow.  And often, when he came to parts of his scheme that were necessary but not interesting to him, he wrote with a slack hand, like a craftsman of genius who knows that his natural gift and acquired skill will turn out something more than good enough for his audience:  wrote probably fluently but certainly negligently, sometimes only half saying what he meant, and sometimes saying the opposite, and now and then, when passion was required, lapsing into bombast because he knew he must heighten his style but would not take the trouble to inflame his imagination.  It may truly be said that what injures such passages is not inspiration, but the want of it.  But, as they are mostly passages where no poet could expect to be inspired, it is even more true to say that here Shakespeare lacked the conscience of the artist who is determined to make everything as good as he can.  Such poets as Milton, Pope, Tennyson, habitually show this conscience.  They left probably scarcely anything that they felt they could improve.  No one could dream of saying that of Shakespeare.