Homer and Shakespeare speak to us probably far more effectually than
they did to the men of their own time, and most likely we have them
at their best. I cannot think that Shakespeare talked better than
we hear him now in Hamlet or Henry the Fourth; like enough he would
have been found a very disappointing person in a drawing-room.
People stamp themselves on their work; if they have not done so they
are naught, if they have we have them; and for the most part they
stamp themselves deeper on their work than on their talk. No doubt
Shakespeare and Handel will be one day clean forgotten, as though
they had never been born. The world will in the end die; mortality
therefore itself is not immortal, and when death dies the life of
these men will die with it--but not sooner. It is enough that they
should live within us and move us for many ages as they have and
will. Such immortality, therefore, as some men and women are born
to achieve, or have thrust upon them, is a practical if not a
technical immortality, and he who would have more let him have
nothing.
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