dently proposed to fitly-prepared readers.

Shakspeare obsolete! There is not a writer of to-day--whose WORDS are
_nearer to our hearts_. OUR OWN _are hardly as intimate there, as_ HIS
_are_--

"You are my true and honourable wife,
_As dear to me as are the ruddy drops
That visit my sad heart_,"

says the troubled Brutus to Portia, who has expressed a misdoubting of his
true and clear affection for her.

Is this "_antiquated_" English, and thence "_unintelligible_?"

"_Viola._--My father had a daughter loved a man,
As it might be, perhaps, WERE I A WOMAN,
I should your lordship.

_Duke._--_And what's her history?_

_Viola._--_A blank, my lord. She never told her love._

* * * * *

_Duke._--But died thy sister of her love, my boy?

_Viola._--I am all the daughters of my father's house,
And all the brothers, too."

"_Miranda._--I am a fool
To weep at what I am glad of.

_Ferdinand._--Where should this music be?
I' th' air?--or th' earth?
It sounds no more; and sure it waits upon
Some god o' th' island. Sitting on a bank,
Weeping again the king my father's wreck,
This music crept by me upon the waters,
Allaying both their fury and my passion
With its sweet air. Thence have I follow'd it,
Or it hath drawn me, rather. But 'tis gone--
No! it begins again.

* * * * *

The ditty does remember my drown'd father.
This is no mortal business, nor no sound
That the earth owes.--I hear it now above me."

Here we have an "_antiquated_" touch or two of what would have distressed
Dryden. "PASSION" is used in the old strong general sense of powerful,
possessing emotion--in this example, filial sorrow; and lower down, we
have the obsolete "OWES" for the modern "OWNS," which two vitiating
reliques of antiquity, along with that "pestering," "affected," and
"obscure" figure, "_crept by me_ upon the waters," would explain, without
doubt, the impossibility which the reader feels himself under, of deriving
any pleasure from the passage, and, to speak strictly, of discovering any
signification in it!!

Assuredly we do not design transcribing whole Shakspeare, in order to
contradicting a rash word of Dryden's. It might not be politic, either;
for we should now and then meet with hard sentences, which might seem,
like unlucky witnesses, to give evidence against the party that brings
them before the tribunal. They