d occasional inaptness your minister--that is, the
ground on which you now excuse yourself. Or, perhaps, no correction is
necessary, if we construe "made you" as "did you make;" "and that
unaptness did you make help you thus to excuse yourself." But the former
seems more in Shakespeare's manner, and is less liable to be
misunderstood.

Act iii. sc. 3. Servant's speech:--

"How fairly this lord strives to appear foul!--takes virtuous
copies to be wicked; _like those that under hot, ardent zeal would
set whole realms on fire. Of such a nature is his politic love_."

This latter clause I grievously suspect to have been an addition of the
players, which had hit, and, being constantly applauded, procured a
settled occupation in the prompter's copy. Not that Shakespeare does not
elsewhere sneer at the Puritans; but here it is introduced so _nolenter
volenter_ (excuse the phrase) by the head and shoulders!--and is besides so
much more likely to have been conceived in the age of Charles I.

Act iv. sc. 3. Timon's speech:--

"Raise me this beggar, and _deny't_ that lord."

Warburton reads "denude."

I cannot see the necessity of this alteration. The editors and
commentators are, all of them, ready enough to cry out against
Shakespeare's laxities and licenses of style, forgetting that he is not
merely a poet, but a dramatic poet; that, when the head and the heart are
swelling with fulness, a man does not ask himself whether he has
grammatically arranged, but only whether (the context taken in) he has
conveyed his meaning. "Deny" is here clearly equal to "withhold;" and the
"it," quite in the genius of vehement conversation, which a syntaxist
explains by ellipses and _subauditurs_ in a Greek or Latin classic, yet
triumphs over as ignorances in a contemporary, refers to accidental and
artificial rank or elevation, implied in the verb "raise." Besides, does
the word "denude" occur in any writer before, or of, Shakespeare's age?

"Romeo And Juliet."

I have previously had occasion to speak at large on the subject of the
three unities of time, place, and action, as applied to the drama in the
abstract, and to the particular stage for which Shakespeare wrote, as far
as he can be said to have written for any stage but that of the universal
mind. I hope I have in some measure succeeded in demonstrating that the
former two, instead of being rules, were mere inconveniences attached to
the local peculiariti