ta ricadde."

There is nothing so improbable in the story of Romeo and Juliet as to
make us doubt the tradition that it is a real fact. "The Veronese," says
Lord Byron, in one of his letters from Verona, "are tenacious to a
degree of the truth of Juliet's story, insisting on the fact, giving the
date 1303, and showing a tomb. It is a plain, open, and partly decayed
sarcophagus, with withered leaves in it, in a wild and desolate
conventual garden--once a cemetery, now ruined, to the very graves! The
situation struck me as very appropriate to the legend, being blighted as
their love." He might have added, that when Verona itself, with its
amphitheatre and its Paladian structures, lies level with the earth, the
very spot on which it stood will be consecrated by the memory of Juliet.

When in Italy, I met a gentleman, who being then "_dans le genre
romantique_," wore a fragment of Juliet's tomb set in a ring.

[30] Foster's Essays

[31] I have read somewhere that the play of which Helena is the heroine,
(All's Well that Ends Well,) was at first entitled by Shakspeare "Love's
Labor Won." Why the title was altered or by whom I cannot discover.

[32] i. e. I care as much for as I do for heaven.

[33] New Monthly Magazine, vol. iv.

[34] Percy's Reliques.

[35] i. e. _canzons_, songs

[36] Percy's Reliques, vol. iii.--see the ballad of the "Lady turning
Serving Man."

[37] By this word, as used here, I would be understood to mean that
inexpressible something within the soul, which tends to the good, the
beautiful, the true, and is the antipodes to the vulgar, the violent,
and the false;--that which we see diffused externally over the form and
movements, where there is perfect innocence and unconsciousness, as in
children.

[38] _i. e._ In the story of the drama; for in the original "History of
Amleth the Dane," from which Shakspeare drew his materials, there is a
woman introduced who is employed as an instrument to seduce Amleth, but
not even the germ of the character of Ophelia.

[39] In the Oedipus Coloneus

[40] "And recks not his own read," _i. e._ heeds not his own lesson.

[41] Blackwood's Magazine, vol. 11.

[42] Act iii. scene 1.

[43] Goethe. See the analysis of Hamlet in Wilhelm Meister

[44] The Iphigenia in Aulis of Euripides.

[45] Goethe

[46] Such as Cornelius Agrippa, Michael Scott, Dr. Dee. The last was the
contemporary of Shakspeare.

[47] In 1609, about three years before Shakspeare