The books were cheap, and could be borrowed, and
turned over at the booksellers' stalls. {96a} The Elizabethan style
was omnipresent. Suppose that Shakespeare was a clever man, a lover
of reading, a rapid reader with an excellent memory, easily
influenced, like Burns, by what he read, and I really think that my
conjectures are not too audacious. Not only "the man in the street,"
but "the reading public" (so loved by Coleridge), have not the
beginning of a guess as to the way in which a quick man reads. Watch
them poring for hours over a newspaper! Let me quote what Sir Walter
Raleigh says: {97a} "Shakespeare was one of those swift and masterly
readers who know what they want of a book; they scorn nothing that is
dressed in print, but turn over the pages with a quick discernment of
all that brings them new information, or jumps with their thought, or
tickles their fancy. Such a reader will have done with a volume in a
few minutes, yet what he has taken from it he keeps for years. He is
a live man; and is sometimes judged by slower wits to be a learned
man."
I am taking Shakespeare to have been a reader of this kind, as was
Dr. Johnson, as are not a few men who have no pretensions to genius.
The accomplishment is only a marvel to--well, I need not be
particular about the kind of person to whom it is a marvel!
Here, in fairness, the reader should be asked to consider an eloquent
passage of comparison between the knowledge of Burns and of Will,
quoted by Mr.
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