There is undoubtedly some truth in the severer criticisms to which some more kindly sentences are a pleasant relief; but there is something too which most persons will be apt to consider as rather harsher than necessary. Is not the moral preacher intruding a little too much on the province of the literary critic? In fact we fancy that, in the midst of these energetic remarks, Carlyle is conscious of certain half-expressed doubts. The name of Shakespeare occurs several times in the course of his remarks, and suggests to us that we can hardly condemn Scott whilst acquitting the greatest name in our literature. Scott, it seems, wrote for money; he coined his brains into cash to buy farms. Did not Shakespeare do pretty much the same? As Carlyle himself puts it, 'beyond drawing audiences to the Globe Theatre, Shakespeare contemplated no result in those plays of his.' Shakespeare, as Pope puts it,
Whom you and every playhouse bill Style the divine, the matchless, what you will, For gain, not glory, wing'd his roving flight, And grew immortal in his own despite.
To write for money was long held to be disgraceful; and Byron, as we know, taunted Scott because his publishers combined
To yield his muse just half-a-crown per line;