English critic William Hazlitt writes in On Shakespeare and Milton,

The striking feature of Shakespeare’s mind was its generic quality, its power of communication with all other minds,—so that it contained a universe of thought and feeling within itself, and had no one particular bias, or exclusive excellence more than another. He was just like any other man, but that he was like all other men. He was the least of an egotist that it was possible to be. He was nothing in himself, but he was all that others were, or that they could become.