, which is a favourite with us, without
noticing some occasional touches of natural piety and morality. We may
allude here to the opening of the scene in which Bellarius instructs the
young princes to pay their orisons to heaven:

----"See, boys! this gate
Instructs you how t' adore the Heav'ns; and bows you
To morning's holy office.

_Guiderius._ Hail, Heav'n!

_Arviragus._ Hail, Heav'n!

_Bellarius._ Now for our mountain-sport, up to yon hill."

What a grace and unaffected spirit of piety breathes in this passage! In
like manner, one of the brothers says to the other, when about to perform
the funeral rites to Fidele,

"Nay, Cadwall, we must lay his head to the east;
My Father hath a reason for't"--

--as if some allusion to the doctrines of the Christian faith had been
casually dropped in conversation by the old man, and had been no farther
inquired into.

Shakspeare's morality is introduced in the same simple, unobtrusive
manner. Imogen will not let her companions stay away from the chase to
attend her when sick, and gives her reason for it--

"Stick to your journal course; _the breach of custom
Is breach of all!_"

When the Queen attempts to disguise her motives for procuring the poison
from Cornelius, by saying she means to try its effects on "creatures not
worth the hanging," his answer conveys at once a tacit reproof of her
hypocrisy, and a useful lesson of humanity--

----"Your Highness
Shall from this practice but make hard your heart."

MACBETH

"The poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shape, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name."

MACBETH and _Lear_, _Othello_ and _Hamlet_, are usually reckoned
Shakspeare's four principal tragedies. _Lear_ stands first for the
profound intensity of the passion; _Macbeth_ for the wildness of the
imagination and the rapidity of the action; _Othello_ for the progressive
interest and powerful alternations of feeling: _Hamlet_ for the refined
development of thought and sentiment. If the force of genius shewn in each
of these works is astonishing, their variety is not less so. They are like
different creations of the same mind, not one of which has the slightest
reference lo the rest. This distinctness and originality is indeed the
neces