characters of Iago, Othello, Hamlet,
Richard III., to which he could never have seen anything similar, he seems
invariably to have asked himself--How should I act or speak in such
circumstances? His comic characters are also peculiar. A drunken constable
was not uncommon; but he makes folly a vehicle for wit, as in Dogberry:
everything is a _sub-stratum_ on which his genius can erect the mightiest
superstructure.

To distinguish that which is legitimate in Shakespeare from what does not
belong to him, we must observe his varied images symbolical of novel
truth, thrusting by, and seeming to trip up each other, from an
impetuosity of thought, producing a flowing metre, and seldom closing with
the line. In _Pericles_, a play written fifty years before, but altered by
Shakespeare, his additions may be recognised to half a line, from the
metre, which has the same perfection in the flowing continuity of
interchangeable metrical pauses in his earliest plays, as in _Love's
Labour's Lost_.

Lastly, contrast his _morality_ with the writers of his own or of the
succeeding age, &c. If a man speak injuriously of our friend, our
vindication of him is naturally warm. Shakespeare has been accused of
profaneness. I for my part have acquired from perusal of him, a habit of
looking into my own heart, and am confident that Shakespeare is an author
of all others the most calculated to make his readers better as well as
wiser.

* * * * *

Shakespeare, possessed of wit, humour, fancy, and imagination, built up an
outward world from the stores within his mind, as the bee finds a hive
from a thousand sweets gathered from a thousand flowers. He was not only a
great poet but a great philosopher. Richard III., Iago, and Falstaff are
men who reverse the order of things, who place intellect at the head,
whereas it ought to follow, like Geometry, to prove and to confirm. No
man, either hero or saint, ever acted from an unmixed motive; for let him
do what he will rightly, still Conscience whispers "it is your duty."
Richard, laughing at conscience and sneering at religion, felt a
confidence in his intellect, which urged him to commit the most horrid
crimes, because he felt himself, although inferior in form and shape,
superior to those around him; he felt he possessed a power which they had
not. Iago, on the same principle, conscious of superior intellect, gave
scope to his envy, and hesitated not to ruin a gallant,