108 



frustrated ; for he alike disregards the wisdom of others 

 and the dictates of his own judgment. All is impulse 

 and passion, leaping to excess, from gaiety to death, 

 from affection to hate, from joy to despair. The air is 

 heavy with wrongs, causeless feuds, mad suspicions, rash 

 and unadvised paternal rule, and impulsive devices. All 

 is framed into one harmony of complementary love and 

 hate, happiness and woe, which beget each other, and 

 which end as such imreasoning acts must ever end — most 

 grievously. There is order in this, thovigh perhaps not 

 of the Turkey-carpet kind. 



In answer to the charge of haste or carelessness, 

 nothing less than all the later di-amas ought properly to 

 be produced. The only circumstance which could for an 

 instant substantiate the charge, is the rapidity with 

 which these wonderful plays were produced. For in- 

 trinsic evidence of haste or indifference we should seek 

 in vain. Unless entire passages were finished at a blow, 

 struck into life, Jonson's praise of " true filed lines" must 

 have been more exact than the assertion that " Shakspere 

 never blotted a line." So accurate seems the finish, so 

 unwearying the care, that to expunge a word from some of 

 the plays would be to strike a splinter from the solid and 

 concrete mass, and leave a flaw as if a fragment had been 

 rudely broken from its graceful and symmetrical out- 

 line. The charges of carelessness are indeed as un- 

 founded as Cecil's — " that he had a low and licentious 

 taste," or Gifford's — •" that he was the corypheus of 

 profanation." The contrary is on all hands demonstrable. 

 Such charges could only have arisen in a criticism of 

 parts, by which a fraction being seen, the incompleteness in 

 that which was necessary to the perfection of the whole, 

 was misunderstood. What was designed with profound 

 intent was thus attributed to ignorance. It was in this 

 spirit that Gibber, and Tate, and Kemble, reconstructed 



