successful war-chief in the Roman people, already become a populace,
contrasted with the jealousy of the nobles in _Julius Caesar_;--or they at
once commence the action so as to excite a curiosity for the explanation
in the following scenes, as in the storm of wind and waves, and the
boatswain in the _Tempest_, instead of anticipating our curiosity, as in
most other first scenes, and in too many other first acts;--or they act, by
contrast of diction suited to the characters, at once to heighten the
effect, and yet to give a naturalness to the language and rhythm of the
principal personages, either as that of Prospero and Miranda by the
appropriate lowness of the style, or as in _King John_, by the equally
appropriate stateliness of official harangues or narratives, so that the
after blank verse seems to belong to the rank and quality of the speakers,
and not to the poet;--or they strike at once the key-note, and give the
predominant spirit of the play, as in the _Twelfth Night_ and in
_Macbeth_;--or finally, the first scene comprises all these advantages at
once, as in _Hamlet_.

Compare the easy language of common life, in which this drama commences,
with the direful music and wild wayward rhythm and abrupt lyrics of the
opening of _Macbeth_. The tone is quite familiar;--there is no poetic
description of night, no elaborate information conveyed by one speaker to
another of what both had immediately before their senses--(such as the
first distich in Addison's _Cato_, which is a translation into poetry of
"Past four o'clock and a dark morning!");--and yet nothing bordering on the
comic on the one hand, nor any striving of the intellect on the other. It
is precisely the language of sensation among men who feared no charge of
effeminacy for feeling what they had no want of resolution to bear. Yet
the armour, the dead silence, the watchfulness that first interrupts it,
the welcome relief of the guard, the cold, the broken expressions of
compelled attention to bodily feelings still under control--all excellently
accord with, and prepare for, the after gradual rise into tragedy;--but,
above all, into a tragedy, the interest of which is as eminently _ad et
apud intra_, as that of _Macbeth_ is directly _ad extra_.

In all the best attested stories of ghosts and visions, as in that of
Brutus, of Archbishop Cranmer, that of Benvenuto Cellini recorded by
himself, and the vision of Galileo communicated by him to his favourite
pupi