And the vivacity of a young lady's imagination may perhaps excuse these lines of Juliet's soliloquy; Come night-come Romeo! come thou day in night, For thou wilt lie upon the wings of night, Come gentle night; come loving black browed night, Take him and cut him out in little stars, But if we once launch out into troubled waters, we are inevitably carried along by the current; if we once allow ourselves to overstep the modesty of nature, it is impossible to say how far depravity of taste may carry us. In that beautiful scene in King John, between Herbert and Arthur, the touching pathos of the boy's entreaties, is often neutralized by a miserable spirit of quibbling. When Herbert tells Arthur that he can revive the sleeping fire with his breath ;the young prince replies,― And if you do, you will but make it blush And glow with shame of your proceeding, Herbert, Snatch at his master that doth tare him on, Who can read these lines, and not feel inclined to cry out with the lively Boileau, on a similar occasion-Quelle extravagance! Tout les glaces du Nord ensemble ne sont pas, a mon sens, plus froides que un pensée. If the passage just quoted is cold and extravagant, what follows is arrant nonsense ; Hath Romeo slain himself? say thou but I, I am not I, if there be such an I, Or those eyes shut, that make thee answer I; Brief sounds determine of my weal or woe. And what better can we say of the following speech of Byron, in Love's Labor Lost? Why, all delights are vain; but that most vain, To seek the light of truth; while truth, the while, Doth falsely blind the eyesight of his look. Light seeking light doth light of light beguile : Who dazzling so, that eye shall be his heed Such are the absurdities into which those who desert truth will find themselves betrayed. Let not the admirers of Shakespeare complain, that his faults are too ostentatiously displayed. Faults, to be avoided, must be known and censured. To criticise obscure authors is useless, for no one is likely to be misled by their errors; it is the faults of great writers, which are dangerous, and to point out these faults is one of the most important functions of criticism. A beautiful image, or a noble thought strikes at once, and needs no comment to make it admired; but to distinguish between gold and tinsel, the paint of nature and the varnish of art, the glitter of falsehood and the light of truth, asks more sagacity than every reader or every writer possesses; and no one need be ashamed to sharpen his perspicuity, and quicken his acuteness in the schools of criticism. There is no cause to fear that criticism can diminish that admiration of Shakspeare, however enthusiastic, which is founded on reason; for though we cannot, perhaps, say of him, what Longinus says of Homer, that were all his faults collected together, they would not equal in amount the thousandth part of his beauties, we may say, that notwithstanding his faults, he is the greatest of the English poets, and that there cannot be found in any other writer, in any language, such numerous examples of every degree or variety of excellence. Of Shakspeare's style, the most obvious peculiarity is his great fondness for metaphor, his constant endeavor, while he forcibly expresses a principal idea, to present us at the same time with two or three collateral pictures. It is to this turn of mind, that we owe so many of those fine passages, which are forever quoted, but which quotation never makes tedious. For example, These passages are certainly beautiful, but perhaps, there is nothing very peculiar in them. Similar beauties may be culled from the works of other poets. But we meet with some passages of metaphorical expression, equally beautiful, and at the same time so novel and uncommon, that we may safely challenge them, as peculiar to Shakspeare. Witness the following extracts. O, she that hath a heart of that fine frame -But alas! Ceasar must bleed for it; and gentle friends, -If I do prove her haggard, Though that her jessies were my dear heart-strings, This same fondness for metaphor, sometimes leads the poet into harshness and obscurity:— With all prerogative. And sometimes betrays him into debasing a noble thought, and connecting it with one mean or ludicrous : Othello tells his friends. Were it my eve to fight, I should have known it Macbeth exclaims, Come thick night, And pall me in the dunnest smoke of hell, That my keen knife see not the wound it makes, Shakspeare's blank verse is far superior to that of any other poet,superior even to Milton's. It is infinitely varied; coming o'er the ear like the sweet south,' when a lover whispers his mistress; lofty and full toned, when Brutus harangues the conspirators, or Henry addresses his army; and as the occasion demands, slow and solemn, smooth and even, rough and harsh, easy and familiar, changing its music as the summer sky changes its colors. This praise, however, does not belong to all the plays. Timon, Cymbeline and Coriolanus are written in a style of versification often so deficient in rhythm as to be scarcely distinguishable from prose; and in all the plays, passages are continually met with, which a little attention to the measure would have essentially improved. For Shakspeare's rhymes much cannot be said. These are fetters which he never learned to wear gracefully. Homer says, that the day a man becomes a slave, he loses half his masculine vigor; we may say of Shakspeare, that whenever he submits to the thraldom of rhymes, the muses seem to desert him. When we meet with a rhymed passage, we shall generally find mean thoughts meanly expressed. This remark, however, like all other general remarks, is to be received with some allowance. There may be found in Shakspeare rhymed passages of undoubted excellence, and the inimitable sweetness and simplicity of his songs cannot be too highly praised. His prose is admirable. It is pure, idiomatic English; easy, yet forcible, it always satisfies the ear. The words scem to drop, as if by instinct, into proper places. With all his carelessness, Shakspeare does not always employ blank verse, prose and rhyme indiscriminately. It would be difficult, perhaps, to give any other reason than the whim of the poet for the few rhymes that occur in the first act of Othello, or to tell why Brutus addresses the people in prose and the conspirators in verse; but it is easy to discover why, in the Midsummer Night's Dream, Bottom and his companions speak in prose, the lovers, for the most part, in blank verse, and the fairies in rhyme; and that, in Much ado about Nothing, prose should be the style of the witty Benedict, seems very fitting, since he confesses that he has no talent for verse, and can find no rhyme for lady but baby, and none for school but fool; very ominous endings, as he justly observes. Yet it is too much to expect of Shakspeare a strict adherence to rule for a whole play together; the fairies sometimes forgot to rhyme, the Athenian lovers after marriage deviate into prose, and Benedict himself, in one scene, runs as smoothly as the rest"in the even road of blank verse." The most remarkable characteristic of Shakspeare is his compass and variety. We find in his dramas specimens of every kind of poetry, and every sort of speculation. He describes human life in all its glory; its pomp, and show, and circumstance; its gaiety, pride, and magnificence; its romantic incidents, its strange surprises, its animating adventures. He describes it, too, in all its bitterness; its pains, crimes, and sorrows; its follies, weakness, and inconsistencies; its blighted hopes, its deceitful pleasures, its insignificant duration. Not dazzled by its splendor, nor disgusted by its meanness, calm and unmoved, he seems to contemplate all its mingled contradictions, with the impartiality of one who feels himself much above it. To borrow the illustration of Lucretius, "he looks down, as from a serene and lofty elevation, upon the delirium of life, with the same feeling of complacent security with which one beholds, from the shore, vessels struggling against the storm, or, from a place of safety, armies joining battle on the plain. But his calmness does not show itself in a fixed insensibility; he is not, like the wise man of the Epicurian philosophy, unmoved by human changes, because he is careless of them. His self-possession appears rather in the flexibility with which, for the moment, he enters in every passion and every sentiment. Whether we are sad or merry, grave or gay, the dramas of Shakspeare will equally serve our turn; we may find something in them exactly accommodated to every complexion of the mind. Yet with whatever solemnity we begin to read, our seriousness will generally soon be relaxed, for the genius of Shakspeare is sportive and riant; he loves to dwell on the bright side of things; he enlivens the gravest scene with some flash of wit, and relieves the saddest by some play of fancy, or touch of humor. He delights to gladden life; to throw sunshine on its dreariest wastes, and strew its flintiest paths with flowers. SUNRISE. Look on the sky! look while its glories last! Soon as the Sun his dazzling orb shall shew, He whom they herald forth-He by whose light they glow? Look on the silent lake! it pictures forth, The mingled colors of the rainbow lie, Seen through the early mist that lightly by A brightness on it that will blast the eye, Than their bright types in heaven. The Sun approaches fast. Now fade these gentler beauties-every tint Lost in a blaze of undistinguished light, |