We are
delivered from that foolish vein of thought, so dear to ignorant
conceit, which degrades the past in order to exalt the present and the
future. It is easy to feel ourselves superior to men who no longer
breathe and walk, and whom we do not trouble to understand. Here is the
real benefit of scholarship; it reduces men to kinship with their race.
Science, pressing forward, and beating against the bars which guard the
secrets of the future, has no such sympathy in its gift.
Anyhow, in Shakespeare's time, England was already old England; which if
she could ever cease to be, she might be Jerusalem, or Paradise, but
would not be England at all. What Shakespeare and his fellows of the
sixteenth century gave her was a new self-consciousness and a new
self-confidence. They foraged in the past; they recognized themselves in
their ancestors; they found feudal England, which had existed for many
hundreds of years, a dumb thing; and when she did not know her own
meaning, they endowed her purposes with words. They gave her a new
delight in herself, a new sense of power and exhilaration, which has
remained with her to this day, surviving all the airy philosophic
theories of humanity which thought to supersede the old solid national
temper.
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