show, contain, and nourish all the world;
Else, none at all in aught proves excellent;
Then fools you were these women to forswear;
Or, keeping what is sworn, you will prove fools.
For wisdom's sake, a word that all men love;
Or for love's sake, a word that loves all men;
Or for men's sake, the authors of these women;
Or women's sake, by whom we men are men;
Let us once lose our oaths, to find ourselves,
Or else we lose ourselves to keep our oaths:
It is religion to be thus forsworn:
For charity itself fulfils the law:
And who can sever love from charity?"--

This is quite a study;--sometimes you see this youthful god of poetry
connecting disparate thoughts purely by means of resemblances in the words
expressing them,--a thing in character in lighter comedy, especially of
that kind in which Shakespeare delights, namely, the purposed display of
wit, though sometimes too, disfiguring his graver scenes;--but more often
you may see him doubling the natural connection or order of logical
consequence in the thoughts by the introduction of an artificial and
sought for resemblance in the words, as, for instance, in the third line
of the play,--

"And then grace us in the disgrace of death;"--

this being a figure often having its force and propriety, as justified by
the law of passion, which, inducing in the mind an unusual activity, seeks
for means to waste its superfluity,--when in the highest degree--in lyric
repetitions and sublime tautology--"At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay
down; at her feet he bowed, he fell; where he bowed, there he fell down
dead,"--and, in lower degrees, in making the words themselves the subjects
and materials of that surplus action, and for the same cause that agitates
our limbs, and forces our very gestures into a tempest in states of high
excitement.

The mere style of narration in _Love's Labour's Lost_, like that of AEgeon
in the first scene of the _Comedy of Errors_, and of the Captain in the
second scene of _Macbeth_, seems imitated with its defects and its
beauties from Sir Philip Sidney; whose _Arcadia_, though not then
published, was already well known in manuscript copies, and could hardly
have escaped the notice and admiration of Shakespeare as the friend and
client of the Earl of Southampton. The chief defect consists in the
parentheses and parenthetic thoughts and descriptions, suited neither to
the passion of the speaker, nor the purpose of the person to whom the
informat