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The following is from the history of Posthumus given by one of the Gentlemen in Cymbeline, i. 1:

"The King he takes the babe To his protection; calls him Posthumus Leonatus; Breeds him, and makes him of his bed-chamber; Puts to him all the learnings that his time Could make him the receiver of; which he took, As we do air, fast as 't was minister'd, And in his spring became a harvest; liv'd in Court— Which rare it is to do—most prais'd, most lov'd; A sample to the youngest; to the more mature A glass that feated them; and to the graver A child that guided dotards: to his mistress, For whom he now is banish'd,—her own price Proclaims how she esteem'd him and his virtue; By her election may be truly read What kind of man he is."

In all these three passages, the structure shapes itself from step to step as it goes on, one idea starting another, and each clause being born of the momentary impulse of the under-working vital current; which is indeed the natural way of unpremeditated, self-forgetting discourse. There is no care about verbal felicities; none for rounded adjustment of parts, or nice balancing of members, or for exactness of pauses and cadences, so as to make the language run smooth on the ear; or, if there be any care about these things, it is rather a care to avoid them. This it is that gives to Shakespeare's style such a truly organic character, in contradistinction to mere pieces of nicely-adjusted verbal joinery or cabinet-work; so that, as we proceed, the lingual form seems budding and sprouting at the moving of the inner mental life; the thought unfolding and branching as the expression grows, and the expression growing with the growth of the thought. In short, language with him is not the dress, but the incarnation of ideas: he does not robe his thoughts with garments externally cut and fitted to them, but his thoughts robe themselves in a living texture of flesh and blood.

* * *

Hence the wonderful correspondence, so often remarked, between the Poet's style and the peculiar moods, tempers, motives, and habits of his characters, as if the language had caught the very grain and tincture of their minds. So, for instance, we find him rightly making the most glib-tongued rhetoric proceed from utter falseness of heart; for men never speak so well, in the elocutionary sense, as when they are lying; while, on the other hand, "there are no tricks in plain and simple faith." Thus, in Macbeth, when the murder of Duncan is first announced, we have the hero speaking of it to the Princes, when one of them asks, "What is amiss?"

"You are, and do not know't: The spring, the head, the fountain of your blood Is stopp'd; the very source of it is stopp'd."

Of course he words the matter so finely all because he is playing the hypocrite. Compare with this the quick honest way in which Macduff dashes out the truth: "Your royal father's murder'd." We have a still more emphatic instance of the same kind in Goneril and Regan's hollow-hearted, and therefore highly rhetorical professions of love, when the doting old King invites his three daughters to an auction of falsehood, by proposing,

"That we our largest bounty may extend Where nature doth with merit challenge."

So, again in Hamlet, i. 2, the King opens with an elaborate strain of phrase-making, full of studied and ingenious antitheses; and he keeps up that style so long as he is using language to conceal his thoughts; but afterwards, in the same speech, on coming to matters of business, he falls at once into the direct, simple style of plain truth and intellectual manhood.

But we have a more curious illustration, though in quite another kind, in Macbeth, iv. 3, where Ross, fresh from Scotland, comes to Macduff in England:

"Macd. Stands Scotland where it did?

Ross. Alas, poor country, Almost afraid to know itself! it cannot Be call'd our mother, but our grave: where nothing, But who knows nothing, is once seen to smile; Where sighs, and groans, and shrieks that rend the air, Are made, not mark'd; where violent sorrow seems A modern