146 Shakspeare 



of the ideal and his consequent craving to 

 idealize the real. In the paradise of the ideal 

 it is natural to plant gods. Moreover, his lan- 

 guage, like that of the Bible, has been so inti- 

 mately wrought into the tissue of the English 

 mind, and is now so familiar a possession, that 

 rhetorical passages which would be deemed 

 obscure, confused, even bombastic in a writer of 

 the present day pass easily — nay, are received 

 with a sort of awful reverence without thought 

 of their incongruity or crudity. True and dis- 

 criminating admiration is smothered in the in- 

 censing adulation which creates its idol and will 

 then have its idol without a haw, making the man 

 a god. What would critics to-day say of a living 

 poet who, speaking of love, were to liken love's 

 fine feelings to "tender horns of cockled snails'' ?* 

 Or make it the special praise of a maiden's 

 slender fingers that they were white as milk ? Or 

 compare the instant falling in love of two lovers 

 at first sight to the behaviour of two rams which, 

 looking up suddenly when pasturing quietly, 

 pause for an instant, then rush headlong full butt, 

 skull against skull, with loud-sounding crash ? Or 

 represent a common prostitute like Doll Tear- 

 sheet as declaiming magniloquently about Hector 

 and Agamemnon ? Furthermore, this often 

 happens nowadays, that a trite and obvious 



* Love's feeling is more soft and sensible 



Than are the tender horns of cockled snails. — 



Loves Labour Lost. 



