success, you see, was answerable; for the croud only applauded the speech of Ajax,—vulgique secutum ultima murmur erat; but the judges awarded the prize for which they contended, to Ulysses:

Mota manus procerum est; et quid facundia posset,
Tum patuit, fortisque viri tulit arma disertus.

The next necessary rule is, to put nothing into the discourse, which may hinder your moving of the passions. Too many accidents, as I have said, incumber the poet as much as the arms of Saul did David; for the variety of passions which they produce are ever crossing and justling each other out of the way. He who treats of joy and grief together, is in a fair way of causing neither of those effects. There is yet another obstacle to be removed, which is pointed wit, and sentences affected out of season; these are nothing of kin to the violence of passion: no man is at leisure to make sentences and similes, when his soul is in an agony. I the rather name this fault, that it may serve to mind me of my former errours; neither will I spare myself, but give an example of this kind from my INDIAN EMPEROR. Montezuma, pursued by his enemies, and secking sanctuary, stands parlying without the fort, and describing his danger to Cydaria, in a simile of six lines:

As on the sands the frighted traveller

Sees the high seas come rolling from afar, &c.

My Indian potentate was well skilled in the sea for an inland prince, and well improved since the first act, when he sent his son to discover it.

The image had not been amiss from another man at another time; sed nunc non erat his locus: he destroyed the concernment which the audience might otherwise have had for him; for they could not think the danger near, when he had the leisure to invent a simile.

If Shakspeare be allowed, as I think he must, to have made his characters distinct, it will easily be inferred that he understood the nature of the passions; because it has been proved already, that confused passions make undistinguishable characters. Yet I cannot deny that he has his failings; but they are not so much in the passions themselves, as in his manner of expression: he often obscures his meaning by his words, and sometimes makes it unintelligible. I will not say of so great a poet, that he distinguished not the blown puffy style, from true sublimity; but I may venture to maintain, that the fury of his fancy often transported him beyond the bounds of judgment, either in coining of new words and phrases, or racking words which were in use into the violence of a catachresis. It is not that I would explode the use of metaphors from passion, for Longinus thinks them necessary to raise it; but to use them at every word, to say nothing without a metaphor, a simile, an image, or description, is, I doubt, to smell a little too strongly of the buskin. I must be forced to give an example of expressing passion figuratively; but that I may do it with respect to Shakspeare, it shall not be taken from

!

any thing of his: it is an exclamation against Fortune, quoted in his HAMLET, but written by some other poet :3

3

"Out, out, thou strumpet, Fortune! All you gods
"In general synod, take away her power;

"Break all the spokes and fellies from her wheel,
"And bowl the round nave down the hill of heaven,
"As low as to the fiends."

3 I once thought, with our author, (as I have elsewhere observed,) that these lines were extracted from some more ancient play, of which it appeared to me probable that Christopher Marlowe was the writer; but whatever may have been Shakspeare's view in introducing them in HAMLET, I am now decidedly of opinion that they were written by himself, not in any former unsuccessful piece, but expressly for that tragedy.

Dr. Warburton had a fancy, that the commendation bestowed on the play from which these lines are supposed to be taken, was given in order "to upbraid the false taste of the audience at that time, which could not suffer them to do justice to the simplicity and sublime of this production." And his notion was, that the play in question" was Shakspeare's own, and this was the occasion. of writing it. He was desirous, as soon as he had found his strength, of restoring the chastness and regularity of the ancient stage, and therefore composed this tragedy on the model of the Greek drama, as may be seen by his throwing so much into action. But his attempt proved fruitless; and the raw unnatural taste, then prevalent, forced him back again into his old Gothick manner. For which, he took this revenge upon his audience."-This fancy Dr. Warburton has endeavoured to support in a dissertation, so little satisfactory, that I doubt whether in

And immediately after, speaking of Hecuba, when Priam was killed before her eyes:

But who, ah woe! had seen the mabled queen "Run bare-foot up and down, threat'ning the flame "With bisson rheum; a clout about that head,

''

To

fifty years it ever made one convert to his opinion. prove that Shakspeare himself considered the first of the passages quoted by Dryden, as bombast, he maintains, that Shakspeare has used the very same thought clothed in the same expression, in one of his best plays, and given it to a principal character, where he aims at the sublime." Thus the Egyptian Queen, in ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA, (according to him,) rails at Fortune in the

same manner :

No, let me speak, and let me rail so high,

"That the false housewife, Fortune, break her wheel, Provoked at my offence."

But Mr. Steevens has observed, that it is by no means proved in this dissertation," that Shakspeare has employed the same thoughts clothed in the same expressions in his best plays. If he bids the false housewife, Fortune, break her wheel, he does not desire her to break all its spokes, nay even its periphery; and make use of the nave afterwards for such an immeasurable cast! Though, if what Dr. Warburton has said should be found in any instance to be exactly true, what can we infer from thence, but that Shakspeare was sometimes wrong in spite of conviction ; and in the hurry of writing committed those very faults which his judgment could correct in others ?"

The poet, in the speeches spoken by the Player in HAMLET, (act ii. sc. 2.) Mr. Steevens thinks "might have meant to exhibit a just resemblance of some of the plays of his own age, in which the faults were too glaring to permit a few splendid passages to atone for them."

"Where late the diadem stood; and, for a robe, "About her lank and all o'er-teemed loins,

"A blanket, in the alarm of fear caught up; "Who this had seen, with tongue in venom steep'd "'Gainst Fortune's state would treason have pronounc'd; "But if the gods themselves did see her then, "When she saw Pyrrhus make malicious sport "In mincing with his sword her husband's limbs; "The instant burst of clamour that she made (Unless things mortal move them not at all) “Would have made milch the burning eyes of heaven, "And passion in the gods."

What a pudder is here kept in raising the expression of trifling thoughts! Would not a man have thought that the poet had been bound 'prentice to a wheel-wright for his first rant? and had followed a ragman, for the clout and blanket, in the second? Fortune is painted on a wheel, and therefore the writer, in a rage, will have poetical justice done upon every member of that engine; after this execution, he bowls the nave downhill, from heaven to the fiends; (an unreasonable long mark a man would think;) it is well there are no solid orbs to stop it in the way, or no element of fire to consume it; but when it came to the earth, it must be monstrous heavy, to break ground as low as to the centre. His making milch the burning eyes of heaven was a pretty tolerable flight too, and I think no man ever drew milk out of eyes before him; yet to make the wonder greater, these eyes were burning. Such a sight, indeed, were enough to have raised passion in the