do.

[56] _Vide_ Dr. Johnson, and Dunlop's History of Fiction.

[57] See Hazlitt and Schlegel on the catastrophe of Cymbeline.

[58] More rare--_i. e._ more exquisitely poignant.

[59] Characters of Shakspeare's Plays.

[60] _Vide_ act 1. scene 7.

[61] The character of Cloten has been pronounced by some unnatural, by
others inconsistent, and by others obsolete. The following passage
occurs in one of Miss Seward's letters, vol. iii p. 246: "It is curious
that Shakspeare should, in so singular a character as Cloten, have given
the exact prototype of a being whom I once knew. The unmeaning frown of
countenance, the shuffling gait, the burst of voice, the bustling
insignificance, the fever and ague fits of valor, the froward
tetchiness, the unprincipled malice, and, what is more curious, those
occasional gleams of good sense amidst the floating clouds of folly
which generally darkened and confused the man's brain, and which, in the
character of Cloten, we are apt to impute to a violation of unity in
character; but in the some-time Captain C----, I saw that the portrait
of Cloten was not out of nature."

[62] i. e. _full of words_.

[63] Dryden.

[64] King Lear may be supposed to have lived about one thousand years
before the Christian era, being the forth or fifth in descent from King
Brut, the great-grandson of AEneas, and the fabulous founder of the
kingdom of Britain.

[65] She is commemorated by Lord Byron. _Vide_ Childe Harold Canto iii.

HISTORICAL CHARACTERS.

CLEOPATRA.

I cannot agree with one of the most philosophical of Shakspeare's
critics, who has asserted "that the actual truth of particular events,
in proportion as we are conscious of it, is a drawback on the pleasure
as well as the dignity of tragedy." If this observation applies at all,
it is equally just with regard to characters: and in either case can we
admit it? The reverence and the simpleness of heart with which
Shakspeare has treated the received and admitted truths of history--I
mean according to the imperfect knowledge of his time--is admirable; his
inaccuracies are few: his general accuracy, allowing for the distinction
between the narrative and the dramatic form, is acknowledged to be
wonderful. He did not steal the precious material from the treasury of
history, to debase its purity,--new-stamp it arbitrarily with effigies
and legends of his own devising and then attempt to pass it current,
like Dryden, Racine, and the