conception or image, by expressing it under the least expected property
belonging to it, and this, again, rendered specially absurd by being
applied to the most current subjects and occurrences. The phrases and
modes of combination in argument were caught by the most ignorant from the
custom of the age, and their ridiculous misapplication of them is most
amusingly exhibited in Costard; whilst examples suited only to the gravest
propositions and impersonations, or apostrophes to abstract thoughts
impersonated, which are in fact the natural language only of the most
vehement agitations of the mind, are adopted by the coxcombry of Armado as
mere artifices of ornament.

The same kind of intellectual action is exhibited in a more serious and
elevated strain in many other parts of this play. Biron's speech at the
end of the Fourth Act is an excellent specimen of it. It is logic clothed
in rhetoric;--but observe how Shakespeare, in his two-fold being of poet
and philosopher, avails himself of it to convey profound truths in the
most lively images,--the whole remaining faithful to the character supposed
to utter the lines, and the expressions themselves constituting a further
development of that character:--

"Other slow arts entirely keep the brain:
And therefore finding barren practisers,
Scarce show a harvest of their heavy toil:
But love, first learned in a lady's eyes,
Lives not alone immured in the brain;
But, with the motion of all elements,
Courses as swift as thought in every power;
And gives to every power a double power,
Above their functions and their offices.
It adds a precious seeing to the eye,
A lover's eyes will gaze an eagle blind;
A lover's ear will hear the lowest sound,
When the suspicious head of theft is stopp'd:
Love's feeling is more soft and sensible,
Than are the tender horns of cockled snails;
Love's tongue proves dainty Bacchus gross in taste;
For valour, is not love a Hercules,
Still climbing trees in the Hesperides?
Subtle as Sphinx; as sweet and musical,
As bright Apollo's lute, strung with his hair;
And when love speaks, the voice of all the gods
Makes heaven drowsy with the harmony.
Never durst poet touch a pen to write,
Until his ink were tempered with love's sighs;
Oh, then his lines would ravish savage ears,
And plant in tyrants mild humility.
From women's eyes this doctrine I derive:
They sparkle still the right Promethean fire;
They are the books, the arts, the academes,
That