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By Root 20221 0

mighty kings with a sort of serio-comic interest, and may well be supposed to have occupied more completely the smaller princes, at a time when the noble's or prince's court contained the only theatre of the domain or principality. This sort of story, too, was admirably suited to Shakespeare's times, when the English court was still the foster-mother of the state and the muses; and when, in consequence, the courtiers, and men of rank and fashion, affected a display of wit, point, and sententious observation, that would be deemed intolerable at present,—but in which a hundred years of controversy, involving every great political, and every dear domestic, interest, had trained all but the lowest classes to participate. Add to this the very style of the sermons of the time, and the eagerness of the Protestants to distinguish themselves by long and frequent preaching, and it will be found that, from the reign of Henry VIII. to the abdication of James II. no country ever received such a national education as England.

Hence the comic matter chosen in the first instance is a ridiculous imitation or apery of this constant striving after logical precision and subtle opposition of thoughts, together with a making the most of every conception or image, by expressing it under the least expected property belonging to it, and this, again, rendered specially absurd by being applied to the most current subjects and occurrences. The phrases and modes of combination in argument were caught by the most ignorant from the custom of the age, and their ridiculous misapplication of them is most amusingly exhibited in Costard; whilst examples suited only to the gravest propositions and impersonations, or apostrophes to abstract thoughts impersonated, which are in fact the natural language only of the most vehement agitations of the mind, are adopted by the coxcombry of Armado as mere artifices of ornament.

The same kind of intellectual action is exhibited in a more serious and elevated strain in many other parts of this play. Biron's speech at the end of the Fourth Act is an excellent specimen of it. It is logic clothed in rhetoric;—but observe how Shakespeare, in his two-fold being of poet and philosopher, avails himself of it to convey profound truths in the most lively images,—the whole remaining faithful to the character supposed to utter the lines, and the expressions themselves constituting a further development of that character:—

“Other slow arts entirely keep the brain:

And therefore finding barren practisers,

Scarce show a harvest of their heavy toil:

But love, first learned in a lady's eyes,

Lives not alone immured in the brain;

But, with the motion of all elements,

Courses as swift as thought in every power;

And gives to every power a double power,

Above their functions and their offices.

It adds a precious seeing to the eye,

A lover's eyes will gaze an eagle blind;

A lover's ear will hear the lowest sound,

When the suspicious head of theft is stopp'd:

Love's feeling is more soft and sensible,

Than are the tender horns of cockled snails;

Love's tongue proves dainty Bacchus gross in taste;

For valour, is not love a Hercules,

Still climbing trees in the Hesperides?

Subtle as Sphinx; as sweet and musical,

As bright Apollo's lute, strung with his hair;

And when love speaks, the voice of all the gods

Makes heaven drowsy with the harmony.

Never durst poet touch a pen to write,

Until his ink were tempered with love's sighs;

Oh, then his lines would ravish savage ears,

And plant in tyrants mild humility.

From women's eyes this doctrine I derive:

They sparkle still the right Promethean fire;

They are the books, the arts, the academes,

That show, contain, and nourish all the world;

Else, none at all in aught proves excellent;

Then fools you were these women to forswear;

Or, keeping what is sworn, you will prove fools.

For wisdom's sake, a word that all men love;

Or for love's sake, a word that loves all men;

Or for men's sake, the authors of these women;

Or women's sake, by whom we men are men;

Let us