tties 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 love of fame.
He wrote for the "great vulgar and the small," in his time, not for
posterity. If Queen Elizabeth and the maids of honour laughed heartily
at his worst jokes, and the catcalls in the gallery were silent at his
best passages, he went home satisfied, and slept the next night well. He
did not trouble himself about Voltaire's criticisms. He was willing to
take advantage of the ignorance of the age in many things; and if his
plays pleased others, not to quarrel with them himself. His very
facility of production would make him set less value on his own
excellences, and not care to distinguish nicely between what he did well
or ill. His blunders in chronology and geography do not amount to above
half a dozen, and they are offences against chronology and geography,
not against poetry. As to the unities, he was right in setting them at
defiance. He was fonder of puns than became so great a man. His
barbarisms were those of his age. His genius was his own. He had no
objection to float down with the stream of common taste and opinion: he
rose above it by his own buoyancy, and an impuls