tes, naturally subverts a man's
understanding and manners, turns his sense, his taste, his decency all
out of doors, and causes him to gloat over loathsome thoughts and
fancies,--this is among the things of human nature which it would be a
sin to omit in a delineation of that passion.

And so of the many absurdities and follies and obscenities which
Shakespeare puts into the mouths of certain persons: for the most
part, they have an ample justification in that they are characteristic
of the speakers; if not beauties of art, they often have a higher
beauty than art, as truths of nature; and the Poet is no more to be
blamed for them than an honest reporter is for the bad taste of a
speaker reported. In like sort, we have Milton's Satan satanizing
thus:

"The mind is its own place, and of itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven."

I have often heard people quote this approvingly, as if they thought
the better of Satan for thus declaring himself independent of God. But
those words coming from Satan are a high stroke of dramatic fitness;
and when people quote them with approval, this may be an argument of
intellectual impiety in them, but not of Milton's agreement with them
in opinion.

But do you say that Shakespeare should not have undertaken to
represent any but persons of refined taste and decorous speech? That
were to cut the Drama off from its proper freehold in the truth of
human character, and also from some of its fruitfullest sources of
instruction and wisdom: so, its office were quite another thing than
"holding the mirror up to Nature." Not indeed but that Shakespeare is
fairly chargeable with some breaches of good taste: these however are
so few and of such a kind, that they still leave him just our highest
authority in the School of Taste. Here, as elsewhere, he is our "canon
of Polycletus." So Raphael made a painting of Apollo play the fiddle
on Parnassus,--a grosser breach of good taste than any thing
Shakespeare ever did. And yet Raphael is the painter of the finest
taste in the world!--All which just approves the old proverb, that "no
man is wise at all hours": so that we may still affirm without
abatement the fine saying of Schlegel, that "genius is the almost
unconscious choice of the highest excellence, and, consequently, it is
taste in the greatest perfection."[17]

[17] All beauty depends upon symmetry and proportion. An
overgrowth that sucks out the strength of a flow