without the fort, and describing his danger to Cydaria, in a
simile of six lines;

As on the sands the frighted traveller
Sees the high seas come rolling from afar, &c.

My Indian potentate was well skilled in the sea for an inland prince,
and well improved since the first act, when he sent his son to
discover it. The image had not been amiss from another man, at another
time: _Sed nunc non erat his locus:_ he destroyed the concernment
which the audience might otherwise have had for him; for they could
not think the danger near, when he had the leisure to invent a simile.

If Shakespeare be allowed, as I think he must, to have made his
characters distinct, it will easily be inferred, that he understood
the nature of the passions: because it has been proved already, that
confused passions make distinguishable characters: yet I cannot deny
that he has his failings; but they are not so much in the passions
themselves, as in his manner of expression: he often obscures his
meaning by his words, and sometimes makes it unintelligible. I will
not say of so great a poet, that he distinguished not the blown puffy
stile, from true sublimity; but I may venture to maintain, that the
fury of his fancy often transported him beyond the bounds of judgment,
either in coining of new words and phrases, or racking words which
were in use, into the violence of a catachresis. It is not that I
would explode the use of metaphors from passion, for Longinus thinks
them necessary to raise it: but to use them at every word, to say
nothing without a metaphor, a simile, an image, or description; is, I
doubt, to smell a little too strongly of the buskin. I must be forced
to give an example of expressing passion figuratively; but that I may
do it with respect to Shakespeare, it shall not be taken from any
thing of his: it is an exclamation against Fortune, quoted in his
Hamlet, but written by some other poet:

Out, out, thou strumpet Fortune! all you gods,
In general synod, take away her power;
Break all the spokes and felleys from her wheel,
And bowl the round nave down the hill of heav'n,
As low as to the fiends.

And immediately after, speaking of Hecuba, when Priam was killed
before her eyes:

But who, ah woe! had seen the mobled queen
Run barefoot up and down, threatening the flame
With bisson rheum; a clout about that head,
Where late the diadem stood; and, for a rob
About her lank and all o'er-teemed loins,