nd, not arising from want of
personal courage, or any specific defect of faculty, but rather an
intellectual feminineness, which feels a necessity of ever leaning on the
breasts of others, and of reclining on those who are all the while known
to be inferiors. To this must be attributed as its consequences all
Richard's vices, his tendency to concealment, and his cunning, the whole
operation of which is directed to the getting rid of present difficulties.
Richard is not meant to be a debauchee; but we see in him that sophistry
which is common to man, by which we can deceive our own hearts, and at one
and the same time apologize for, and yet commit, the error. Shakespeare
has represented this character in a very peculiar manner. He has not made
him amiable with counterbalancing faults; but has openly and broadly drawn
those faults without reserve, relying on Richard's disproportionate
sufferings and gradually emergent good qualities for our sympathy; and
this was possible, because his faults are not positive vices, but spring
entirely from defect of character.

Act ii. sc. 1.--

"_K. Rich._ Can sick men play so nicely with their names?"

Yes! on a death-bed there is a feeling which may make all things appear
but as puns and equivocations. And a passion there is that carries off its
own excess by plays on words as naturally, and, therefore, as
appropriately to drama, as by gesticulations, looks, or tones. This
belongs to human nature as such, independently of associations and habits
from any particular rank of life or mode of employment; and in this
consists Shakespeare's vulgarisms, as in Macbeth's--

"The devil damn thee black, thou cream-fac'd loon!" &c.

This is (to equivocate on Dante's words) in truth the _nobile volgare
eloquenza_. Indeed it is profoundly true that there is a natural, an
almost irresistible, tendency in the mind, when immersed in one strong
feeling, to connect that feeling with every sight and object around it;
especially if there be opposition, and the words addressed to it are in
any way repugnant to the feeling itself, as here in the instance of
Richard's unkind language:--

"Misery makes sport to mock itself."

No doubt, something of Shakespeare's punning must be attributed to his
age, in which direct and formal combats of wit were a favourite pastime of
the courtly and accomplished. It was an age more favourable, upon the
whole, to vigour of intellect than the present, in which a dread o