ion is to be given, but manifestly betraying the author
himself,--not by way of continuous undersong, but--palpably, and so as to
show themselves addressed to the general reader. However, it is not
unimportant to notice how strong a presumption the diction and allusions
of this play afford, that, though Shakespeare's acquirements in the dead
languages might not be such as we suppose in a learned education, his
habits had, nevertheless, been scholastic, and those of a student. For a
young author's first work almost always bespeaks his recent pursuits, and
his first observations of life are either drawn from the immediate
employments of his youth, and from the characters and images most deeply
impressed on his mind in the situations in which those employments had
placed him;--or else they are fixed on such objects and occurrences in the
world, as are easily connected with, and seem to bear upon, his studies
and the hitherto exclusive subjects of his meditation. Just as Ben Jonson,
who applied himself to the drama after having served in Flanders, fills
his earliest plays with true or pretended soldiers, the wrongs and
neglects of the former, and the absurd boasts and knavery of their
counterfeits. So Lessing's first comedies are placed in the universities,
and consist of events and characters conceivable in an academic life.

I will only further remark the sweet and tempered gravity, with which
Shakespeare in the end draws the only fitting moral which such a drama
afforded. Here Rosaline rises up to the full height of Beatrice:--

"_Ros._ Oft have I heard of you, my lord Biron,
Before I saw you: and the world's large tongue
Proclaims you for a man replete with mocks;
Full of comparisons, and wounding flouts,
Which you on all estates will execute
That lie within the mercy of your wit:
To weed this wormwood from your fruitful brain,
And therewithal, to win me, if you please
(Without the which I am not to be won),
You shall this twelvemonth term from day to day
Visit the speechless sick, and still converse
With groaning wretches; and your talk shall be,
With all the fierce endeavour of your wit,
To enforce the pained impotent to smile.

_Biron._ To move wild laughter in the throat of death?
It cannot be; it is impossible;
Mirth cannot move a soul in agony.

_Ros._ Why, that's the way to choke a gibing spirit,
Whose influence is begot of that loose grace,
Which shallow laughing hearers give to fools;
A jest's prosperi