In either
case we moderns at least might haply desire the intervention of a
beadle's hand as heavy and a sceptral cudgel as knotty as ever the son of
Laertes applied to the shoulders of the first of the type or the tribe of
Thersites. For this brutal and brutish buffoon--I am speaking of
Shakespeare's Thersites--has no touch of humour in all his currish
composition: Shakespeare had none as nature has none to spare for such
dirty dogs as those of his kind or generation. There is not even what
Coleridge with such exquisite happiness defined as being the
quintessential property of Swift--"_anima Rabelaesii habitans in
sicco_--the soul of Rabelais dwelling in a dry place." It is the fallen
soul of Swift himself at its lowest, dwelling in a place yet drier: the
familiar spirit or less than Socratic daemon of the Dean informing the
genius of Shakespeare. And thus for awhile infected and possessed, the
divine genius had not power to re-inform and re-create the daemonic
spirit by virtue of its own clear essence. This wonderful play, one of
the most admirable among all the works of Shakespeare's immeasurable and
unfathomable intelligence, as it must always hold its natural high place
among the most admired, will always in all probability be also, and as
naturally, the least beloved of all.
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