ing Claudius, but Hamlet himself, who, on his side,--and here quite in
character--has already enlarged on the same topic in the most famous of
his soliloquies?

(_g_) Lastly, like nearly all the dramatists of his day and of times
much earlier, Shakespeare was fond of 'gnomic' passages, and introduces
them probably not more freely than his readers like, but more freely
than, I suppose, a good play-wright now would care to do. These
passages, it may be observed, are frequently rhymed (_e.g._ _Othello_,
I. iii. 201 ff., II. i. 149 ff.). Sometimes they were printed in early
editions with inverted commas round them, as are in the First Quarto
Polonius's 'few precepts' to Laertes.

If now we ask whence defects like these arose, we shall observe that
some of them are shared by the majority of Shakespeare's contemporaries,
and abound in the dramas immediately preceding his time. They are
characteristics of an art still undeveloped, and, no doubt, were not
perceived to be defects. But though it is quite probable that in regard
to one or two kinds of imperfection (such as the superabundance of
'gnomic' passages) Shakespeare himself erred thus ignorantly, it is very
unlikely that in most cases he did so, unless in the first years of his
career of authorship. And certainly he never can have thought it
artistic to leave inconsistencies, obscurities, or passages of bombast
in his work. Most of the defects in his writings must be due to
indifference or want of care.

I do not say that all were so. In regard, for example, to his occasional
bombast and other errors of diction, it seems hardly doubtful that his
perception was sometimes at fault, and that, though he used the English
language like no one else, he had not that _sureness_ of taste in words
which has been shown by some much smaller writers. And it seems not
unlikely that here he suffered from his comparative want of
'learning,'--that is, of familiarity with the great writers of
antiquity. But nine-tenths of his defects are not, I believe, the errors
of an inspired genius, ignorant of art, but the sins of a great but
negligent artist. He was often, no doubt, over-worked and pressed for
time. He knew that the immense majority of his audience were incapable
of distinguishing between rough and finished work. He often felt the
degradation of having to live by pleasing them. Probably in hours of
depression he was quite indifferent to fame, and perhaps in another mood
the whole b