body, for instance, could not recollect
the words of the following description,

"--Light thickens,
And the crow makes wing to the rooky wood,"

he would be greatly at a loss to substitute others for them equally
expressive of the feeling. These remarks, however, are strictly applicable
only to the impassioned parts of Shakspeare's language, which flowed from
the warmth and originality of his imagination, and were his own. The
language used for prose conversation and ordinary business is sometimes
technical, and involved in the affectation of the time. Compare, for
example, Othello's apology to the senate, relating "his whole course of
love," with some of the preceding parts relating to his appointment, and
the official dispatches from Cyprus. In this respect, "the business of the
state does him offence."--His versification is no less powerful, sweet,
and varied. It has every occasional excellence, of sullen intricacy,
crabbed and perplexed, or of the smoothest and loftiest expansion--from
the ease and familiarity of measured conversation to the lyrical sounds

"--Of ditties highly penned,
Sung by a fair queen in a summer's bower,
With ravishing division to her lute."

It is the only blank verse in the language, except Milton's, that for
itself is readable. It is not stately and uniformly swelling like his, but
varied and broken by the inequalities of the ground it has to pass over in
its uncertain course,

"And so by many winding nooks it strays,
With willing sport to the wild ocean."

It remains to speak of the faults of Shakspeare. They are not so many or
so great as they have been represented; what there are, are chiefly owing
to the following causes:--The universality of his genius was, perhaps, a
disadvantage to his single works; the variety of his resources sometimes
diverting him from applying them to the most effectual purposes. He might
be said to combine the powers of AEschylus and Aristophanes, of Dante and
Rabelais, in his own mind. If he had been only half what he was, he would
perhaps have appeared greater. The natural ease and indifference of his
temper made him sometimes less scrupulous than he might have been. He is
relaxed and careless in critical places; he is in earnest throughout only
in Timon, Macbeth, and Lear. Again, he had no models of acknowledged
excellence constantly in view to stimulate his efforts, and by all that
appears, no lov