Walter Savage Landor, 1846 (1775-1864)
“Shakespeare and Bacon.”
Southey.—In so wide and untrodden a creation as that of Shakespeare’s, can we wonder or complain that sometimes we are bewildered and entangled in the exuberance of fertility? Dry-brained men upon the continent, the trifling wits of the theatre, accurate however and expert calculators, tell us that his beauties are balanced by his faults. The poetical opposition, puffing for popularity, cry cheerily against them, his faults are balanced by his beauties; when, in reality, all the faults that ever were committed in poetry would be but as air to earth, if we could weigh them against one single thought or image, such as almost every scene exhibits in every drama of this unrivalled genius. Do you hear me with patience?
Porson.—With more; although at Cambridge we rather discourse on Bacon, for we know him better. He was immeasurably a less wise man than Shakespeare, and not a wiser writer: for he knew his fellow-man only as he saw him in the street and in the Court, which indeed is but a dirtier street and a narrower; Shakespeare, who also knew him there, knew him everywhere else, both as he was and as he might be.
Southey.—There is as great a difference between Shakespeare and Bacon as between an American forest and a London timber-yard. In the timber-yard the materials are sawed and squared and set across; in the forest we have the natural form of the tree, all its growth, all its branches, all its leaves, all the mosses that grow about it, all the birds and insects that inhabit it; now deep shadows absorbing the whole wilderness; now bright bursting glades, with exuberant grass and flower and fruitage; now untroubled skies; now terrific thunderstorms; everywhere multiformity, everywhere immensity.
“Southey and Porson.” Imaginary Conversations. Works, 1846, i. pp. 12-13.
This is from the enlarged edition of the Imaginary Conversations. It does not appear in the original Southey-Porson “Conversation” published in 1824.