s as a trilogy connected in one single
representation. Divide _Lear_ into three parts, and each would be a play
with the ancients; or take the three AEschylean dramas of _Agamemnon_, and
divide them into, or call them, as many acts, and they together would be
one play. The first act would comprise the usurpation of AEgisthus, and the
murder of Agamemnon; the second, the revenge of Orestes, and the murder of
his mother; and the third, the penance and absolution of
Orestes;--occupying a period of twenty-two years.

The stage in Shakespeare's time was a naked room with a blanket for a
curtain; but he made it a field for monarchs. That law of unity, which has
its foundations, not in the factitious necessity of custom, but in nature
itself, the unity of feeling, is everywhere and at all times observed by
Shakespeare in his plays. Read _Romeo and Juliet_;--all is youth and
spring;--youth with its follies, its virtues, its precipitancies;--spring
with its odours, its flowers, and its transiency; it is one and the same
feeling that commences, goes through, and ends the play. The old men, the
Capulets and Montagues, are not common old men; they have an eagerness, a
heartiness, a vehemence, the effect of spring; with Romeo, his change of
passion, his sudden marriage, and his rash death, are all the effects of
youth;--whilst in Juliet love has all that is tender and melancholy in the
nightingale, all that is voluptuous in the rose, with whatever is sweet in
the freshness of spring; but it ends with a long deep sigh like the last
breeze of the Italian evening. This unity of feeling and character
pervades every drama of Shakespeare.

It seems to me that his plays are distinguished from those of all other
dramatic poets by the following characteristics:--

1. Expectation in preference to surprise. It is like the true reading of
the passage--"God said, Let there be light, and there was _light_;"--not,
there _was_ light. As the feeling with which we startle at a shooting star
compared with that of watching the sunrise at the pre-established moment,
such and so low is surprise compared with expectation.

2. Signal adherence to the great law of nature, that all opposites tend to
attract and temper each other. Passion in Shakespeare generally displays
libertinism, but involves morality; and if there are exceptions to this,
they are, independently of their intrinsic value, all of them indicative
of individual character, and, like the far