In fair round belly, with good capon lin'd,
With eyes severe, and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth Age shifts
Into the lean and slipper'd Pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose, and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well sav'd, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice
Turning again tow'rd childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound: Last Scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful History,
Is second childishness and meer oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans ev'ry thing.

His Images are indeed ev'ry where so lively, that the thing he would
represent stands full before you, and you possess ev'ry part of it. I will
venture to point out one more, which is, I think, as strong and as
uncommon as any thing I ever saw; 'tis an image of Patience. Speaking of a
maid in love, he says,

----She never told her love,
But let concealment, like a worm i'th' bud,
Feed on her damask cheek: She pin'd in thought,
And sate like _Patience_ on a monument,
Smiling at _Grief_.

What an Image is here given! and what a task would it have been for the
greatest masters of _Greece_ and _Rome_ to have express'd the passions
design'd by this sketch of Statuary! The stile of his Comedy is, in
general, natural to the characters, and easie in it self; and the wit most
commonly sprightly and pleasing, except in those places where he runs into
dogrel rhymes, as in _The Comedy of Errors_, and a passage or two in some
other plays. As for his jingling sometimes, and playing upon words, it was
the common vice of the age he liv'd in: And if we find it in the Pulpit,
made use of as an ornament to the Sermons of some of the gravest Divines
of those times; perhaps it may not be thought too light for the Stage.

But certainly the greatness of this Author's genius do's no where so much
appear, as where he gives his imagination an entire loose, and raises his
fancy to a flight above mankind and the limits of the visible world. Such
are his attempts in _The Tempest_, _Midsummer Nights Dream_, _Macbeth_,
and _Hamlet_. Of these, _The Tempest_, however it comes to be plac'd the
first by the former publishers of his works, can never have been the first
written by him: It seems to me as perfect in its kind, as almost any thing
we have of his. One may observe, that the Unities are kept here, wi