THK POEMS OF SHAKSPEAUK. 453 



is so implacable, that satisfaction can be none but by pangs of death and 

 sepulchre :" and how he still rises above himself in his address to Sir 

 Andrew Ague- cheek, " Why, man, he is a very devil; I have not seen 

 such a virago, &c. &c. A. Pox on't ! I'll not meddle with him. T. 

 Ay, but he'll not now be pacified ; Fabian can scarce hold him yonder." 

 With an equally ludicrous gravity, Truewit magnifies his adversary to the 

 affrighted Daw. "I have known many men, in my time, vexed with 

 losses, with deaths, and with abuses, but so offended a wight as Sir 

 Amorous did I never see or read of," &c. &c. And when Daw asks him 

 whether he is armed ? T. " Armed ! Did you ever see a fellow set out 

 to take possession ? D. I, sir. T. That may give you some light to 

 conceive him ; but 'tis nothing to the principal." And then to his 

 rival " Enter here, if you love your life. A. Why, why ? T. Question 

 till your throat be cut do dally till the enraged soul finds you. A. 

 Who is that ? T. Daw it is ; will you in ?" He afterwards informs 

 him " Daw walks the round up and down through every room of the 

 house, with a towel in his hand, crying, ' Where is Lafoole ? who saw 

 Lafoole ?' And when Dauphin and I asked the cause, we could force no 

 answer from him but, ' O revenge, how sweet art thou I will strangle 

 him with this towel.' " 



So far the two poets laugh equally well and equally heartily 



" But there, 

 I doubt, all likeness ends between the pair." 



In Ben Jonson, we enjoy the meek sincerity of Daw's panic, so finely 

 contrasted with the furious cowardice of Sir Amorous, who seems to fly 

 into a passion with his enemy for doubting his powers of enduring every 

 contrivable indignity. The whole is excellently comic ; and if our 

 laughter is interrupted, it is but to reflect, with Truewit, " who fears the 

 most," and perhaps decide with Cleremont, " this fears the bravest the 

 other a whmelling dastard, Jack Daw, but Lafoole a brave heroic coward, 

 and is afraid in a great look and a stout accent. I like him rarely." 

 How different is Shakspeare's management of his materials ! By our 

 previous knowledge of the sex of Viola, an interest, however slight, is 

 excited, and the attention is no longer divided between two comic 

 objects, but the contrast is between the glare of the ridiculous and the 

 shade of the pathetic. That " tragicomedy" which Jonson professes to 

 enact between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, Daw and Lafoole, is, in 

 sober truth, discernible in Shakspeare. We enter seriously into Viola's 

 feelings, when she deprecates the duel ; and we mentally join with her 

 when she exclaims, " Pray God defend me ; a little thing would make 

 me tell them how much I lack of man." This pathos, which runs 

 through the comedy of Shakspeare, is the chrysalis of tragedy, and the 

 essential difference of the higher order of intellect. 



But, in reproving the errors, of which real genius has been guilty in 

 its estimate of Shakspeare, we are involuntarily reminded of a paragraph 

 in the most able essay of a review we recollect to have read with surpass- 

 ing pleasure ; we cannot pass it over in silence, for it seems to us to 

 encroach on the honours of him for whom we are jealous, and it is, per- 

 haps, the only opinion in that essay, with which we do not admiringly 



M.M. No. 11. 3 M 



