There is a kindred gift in Robert Browning, which makes its confession thus:--
"If we have souls, know how to see and use, One place performs, like any other place, The proper service every place on earth Was framed to furnish man with; serves alike To give him note that, through the place he sees, A place is signified he never saw, But, if he lack not soul, may learn to know."
The soul of the true artist being cosmopolitan, any place can become the centre of his circumference; for he is already outside of the world which his neighborhood is too little to embrace. Perhaps his neighbors are penurious step-dames who make scanty provision for emotion, and detest passionate experiences of every kind. But his imagination cannot starve. It implies all "the pomp and circumstance of glorious" life, just as the genius of creation involved and anticipated ourselves, who dress for it a perpetual banquet though no man sees it feeding, and none offer it their alms. The artist's soul transmutes the refuse of factories, the sweepings of coal, bone-parings, and street-scraps into the brilliant colors which, like clarions, precede Beauty's procession and summon the spectators.
If Lord Bacon wrote the plays, he must have conceived the female characters which invest them with such dignity and graciousness. To have done that required a comprehension of the varieties of the female disposition, such as could be derived only from personal contact and experience. To have seized some broad features of the plays, Bacon must have been acquainted with many degrees of social state beneath his own. We can trust Shakspeare in the tavern and its purlieus as frankly as we would the Persian poets, Saadi and Omer Khayam, who saw in the full cup a symbol of the divine afflatus. But we cannot imagine that Bacon was a frequenter of those London haunts where Dick the Butcher took his ale before Jack Cade decreed that the three-hooped pot should have ten hoops, and made it felony to drink small-beer; where Falstaff leered and tossed his ballast over in a sea of sack; where Parolles vapored, and Bardolph blushed, and Pistol's English grew tipsy; where Sir Andrew and Sir Toby roared catches, and Feste and the other clowns made excellent fooling into the small hours; where Bottom mildly exhaled at the head of the table at which Flute, Snout, and Starveling took their pots after the shop-shutters were up; where Dame Quickly maundered, and Mistress Overdone and Doll Tear-street made largess of their brassy smiles. A poet may convert the tavern-bench into a wool-sack: "This chair shall be my state, this dagger my sceptre, and this cushion my crown." But a Queen's Solicitor and future Lord Chancellor could not risk pawning the wool-sack for a tavern-bench. Even the gift of poetry would not have so badly endangered his prospects.