"Hung be the heavens with black, yield day to night!
Comets, importing change of times and states,
Brandish your crystal tresses in the sky;
And with them scourge the bad revolting stars
That have consented unto Henry's death!
Henry the fifth, too famous to live long!
England ne'er lost a king of so much worth."

Read aloud any two or three passages in blank verse even from
Shakespeare's earliest dramas, as _Love's Labour's Lost_, or _Romeo and
Juliet_; and then read in the same way this speech, with especial
attention to the metre; and if you do not feel the impossibility of the
latter having been written by Shakespeare, all I dare suggest is, that you
may have ears,--for so has another animal,--but an ear you cannot have, _me
judice_.

"Richard III."

This play should be contrasted with _Richard II._ Pride of intellect is
the characteristic of Richard, carried to the extent of even boasting to
his own mind of his villany, whilst others are present to feed his pride
of superiority; as in his first speech, act ii. sc. 1. Shakespeare here,
as in all his great parts, developes in a tone of sublime morality the
dreadful consequences of placing the moral, in subordination to the mere
intellectual, being. In Richard there is a predominance of irony,
accompanied with apparently blunt manners to those immediately about him,
but formalised into a more set hypocrisy towards the people as represented
by their magistrates.

"Lear."

Of all Shakespeare's plays _Macbeth_ is the most rapid, _Hamlet_ the
slowest, in movement. _Lear_ combines length with rapidity,--like the
hurricane and the whirlpool, absorbing while it advances. It begins as a
stormy day in summer, with brightness; but that brightness is lurid, and
anticipates the tempest.

It was not without forethought, nor is it without its due significance,
that the division of Lear's kingdom is in the first six lines of the play
stated as a thing already determined in all its particulars, previously to
the trial of professions, as the relative rewards of which the daughters
were to be made to consider their several portions. The strange, yet by no
means unnatural, mixture of selfishness, sensibility, and habit of feeling
derived from, and fostered by, the particular rank and usages of the
individual;--the intense desire of being intensely beloved,--selfish, and
yet characteristic of the selfishness of a loving and kindly nature
alone;--the self-supportle