19th Century Shakespeare

We (=I) tend to dismiss 19th Century Shakespeare as just so much arm-waving and bluster, as if nothing much happened before Granville Barker.

We (=I) may be mostly right, but it is useful not to get carried away. But here is an appraisal that strikes me as surprisingly modern, and from a surprising source-the famously irascible sixth President of the United States, John Quincy Adams:

Hamlet is the personification of a man, in the prime of life, with a mind cultivated by learning, combining intelligence and sensibility in their highest degrees, within a step of the highest distinction attainable on earth. He is crushed to extinction by the pressure of calamities inflicted, not by nature, but against nature, not by physical, but by moral evil. Hamlet is the heart and soul of man, in all their perfection and all their frailty, in agonizing conflict with human crime, also in its highest pre-eminence of guilt.

H/T: CrankYankee, who evidently does historical dress-up recreations of JQA. Credited to a journl entry for February 19, 1839.