derstand. It is the bustle of a tempest,
from which the real horrors are abstracted;--therefore it is poetical,
though not in strictness natural--(the distinction to which I have so often
alluded)--and is purposely restrained from concentering the interest on
itself, but used merely as an induction or tuning for what is to follow.

In the second scene, Prospero's speeches, till the entrance of Ariel,
contain the finest example I remember of retrospective narration for the
purpose of exciting immediate interest, and putting the audience in
possession of all the information necessary for the understanding of the
plot. Observe, too, the perfect probability of the moment chosen by
Prospero (the very Shakespeare himself, as it were, of the tempest) to
open out the truth to his daughter, his own romantic bearing, and how
completely anything that might have been disagreeable to us in the
magician, is reconciled and shaded in the humanity and natural feelings of
the father. In the very first speech of Miranda, the simplicity and
tenderness of her character are at once laid open;--it would have been lost
in direct contact with the agitation of the first scene. The opinion once
prevailed, but happily is now abandoned, that Fletcher alone wrote for
women;--the truth is, that with very few, and those partial exceptions, the
female characters in the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher are, when of the
light kind, not decent; when heroic, complete viragos. But in Shakespeare
all the elements of womanhood are holy, and there is the sweet yet
dignified feeling of all that _continuates_ society, as sense of ancestry
and of sex, with a purity unassailable by sophistry, because it rests not
in the analytic processes, but in that sane equipoise of the faculties,
during which the feelings are representative of all past experience,--not
of the individual only, but of all those by whom she has been educated,
and their predecessors, even up to the first mother that lived.
Shakespeare saw that the want of prominence, which Pope notices for
sarcasm, was the blessed beauty of the woman's character, and knew that it
arose not from any deficiency, but from the more exquisite harmony of all
the parts of the moral being constituing one living total of head and
heart. He has drawn it, indeed, in all its distinctive energies of faith,
patience, constancy, fortitude,--shown in all of them as following the
heart, which gives its results by a nice tact and happy