5. ‘To begin then with Shakspeare: he was the man who of all modern, and perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul. All the images of nature were still present to him, and he drew them not laboriously, but luckily: when he describes any thing, you more than see it, you feel it too. Those who accuse him to have wanted learning, give him the greater commendation: he was naturally learned: he needed not the spectacles of books to read nature; he looked inwards and found her there. I cannot say, he is every where alike; were he so, I should do him injury to compare him with the greatest of mankind. He is many times flat, and insipid; his comic wit degenerating into clenches, his serious swelling into bombast. But he is always great, when some great occasion is presented to him. No man can say, he ever had a fit subject for his wit, and did not then raise himself as high above the rest of poets,
6. Written in the Fleet Prison.
7. Pope also declares that he had a particular regard for an old post which stood in the court-yard before the house where he was brought up.
8. Burns.—These lines are taken from the introduction to Mr. Wordsworth’s poem of the Leech-gatherer.
9. Sonnet on Sherwood Forest, by J. H. Reynolds, Esq.
10. There is the same idea in Blair’s Grave.
Mr. Campbell in altering the expression has spoiled it. ‘Few,’ and ‘far between,’ are the same thing.
11. .sp 1
12. In some Roman Catholic countries, pictures in part supplied the place of the translation of the Bible: and this dumb art arose in the silence of the written oracles.
13. See a Voyage to the Straits of Magellan, 1594.
15. He died about 1594.
16. An anachronism.
17. This expression seems to be ridiculed by Falstaff.
18. .sp 1
19. .sp 1
20. Sir John Harrington’s translation.
21. See the conclusion of Lecture IV.
22. ‘Am I not thy Duchess?
Bosola. Thou art some great woman, sure; for riot begins to sit on thy forehead (clad in gray hairs) twenty years sooner than on a merry milkmaid’s. Thou sleep’st worse than if a mouse should be forced to take up his lodging in a cat’s ear: a little infant that breeds its teeth, should it lie with thee, would cry out, as if thou wert the more unquiet bed-fellow.
Duch. I am Duchess of Malfy still.’
23. Euphrasia as the Page, just before speaking of her life, which Philaster threatens to take from her, says,
24. The following criticism on this play has appeared in another publication, but may be not improperly inserted here:
‘A New Way to Pay Old Debts is certainly a very admirable play, and highly characteristic of the genius of its author, which was hard and forcible, and calculated rather to produce a strong impression than a pleasing one. There is considerable unity of design and a progressive interest in the fable, though the artifice by which the catastrophe is brought about, (the double assumption of the character of favoured lovers by Wellborn and Lovell), is somewhat improbable, and out of date; and the moral is peculiarly striking, because its whole weight falls upon one who all along prides himself in setting every principle of justice and all fear of consequences at defiance.
‘The character of Sir Giles Overreach (the most prominent feature of the play, whether in the perusal, or as it is acted) interests us less by exciting our sympathy than our indignation. We hate him very heartily, and yet not enough; for he has strong, robust points about him that repel the impertinence of censure, and he sometimes succeeds in making us stagger in our opinion of his conduct, by throwing off any idle doubts or scruples that might hang upon it in his own mind, ‘like dew-drops from the lion’s mane.’ His steadiness of purpose scarcely stands in need of support from the common sanctions of morality, which he intrepidly breaks through, and he almost conquers our prejudices by the consistent and determined manner in which he braves them. Self-interest is his idol, and he makes no secret of his idolatry: he is only a more devoted and unblushing worshipper at this shrine than other men. Self-will is the only rule of his conduct, to which he makes every other feeling bend: or rather, from the nature of his constitution, he has no sickly, sentimental obstacles to interrupt him in his headstrong career. He is a character of obdurate self-will, without fanciful notions or natural affections; one who has no regard to the feelings of others, and who professes an equal disregard to their opinions. He minds nothing but his own ends, and takes the shortest and surest way to them. His understanding is clear-sighted, and his passions strong-nerved. Sir Giles is no flincher, and no hypocrite; and he gains almost as much by the hardihood with which he avows his impudent and sordid designs as others do by their caution in concealing them. He is the demon of selfishness personified; and carves out his way to the objects of his unprincipled avarice and ambition with an arm of steel, that strikes but does not feel the blow it inflicts. The character of calculating, systematic self-love, as the master-key to all his actions, is preserved with great truth of keeping and in the most trifling circumstances. Thus ruminating to himself he says, “I’ll walk, to get me an appetite: ’tis but a mile; and exercise will keep me from being pursy!”—Yet to show the absurdity and impossibility of a man’s being governed by any such pretended exclusive regard to his own interest, this very Sir Giles, who laughs at conscience, and scorns opinion, who ridicules every thing as fantastical but wealth, solid, substantial wealth, and boasts of himself as having been the founder of his own fortune, by his contempt for every other consideration, is ready to sacrifice the whole of his enormous possessions—to what?—to a title, a sound, to make his daughter “right honourable,” the wife of a lord whose name he cannot repeat without loathing, and in the end he becomes the dupe of, and falls a victim to, that very opinion of the world which he despises!
The character of Sir Giles Overreach has been found fault with as unnatural; and it may, perhaps, in the present refinement of our manners, have become in a great measure obsolete. But we doubt whether even still, in remote and insulated parts of the country, sufficient traces of the same character of wilful selfishness, mistaking the inveteracy of its purposes for their rectitude, and boldly appealing to power as justifying the abuses of power, may not be found to warrant this an undoubted original—probably a fac-simile of some individual of the poet’s actual acquaintance. In less advanced periods of society than that in which we live, if we except rank, which can neither be an object of common pursuit nor immediate attainment, money is the only acknowledged passport to respect. It is not merely valuable as a security from want, but it is the only defence against the insolence of power. Avarice is sharpened by pride and necessity. There are then few of the arts, the amusements, and accomplishments that soften and sweeten life, that raise or refine it: the only way in which any one can be of service to himself or another, is by his command over the gross commodities of life; and a man is worth just so much as he has. Where he who is not ‘lord of acres’ is looked upon as a slave and a beggar, the soul becomes wedded to the soil by which its worth is measured, and takes root in it in proportion to its own strength and stubbornness of character. The example of Wellborn may be cited in illustration of these remarks. The loss of his land makes all the difference between “young master Wellborn” and “rogue Wellborn;” and the treatment he meets with in this latter capacity is the best apology for the character of Sir Giles. Of the two it is better to be the oppressor than the oppressed.
‘Massinger, it is true, dealt generally in extreme characters, as well as in very repulsive ones. The passion is with him wound up to its height at once, and he never lets it down afterwards. It does not gradually arise out of previous circumstances, nor is it modified by other passions. This gives an appearance of abruptness, violence, and extravagance to all his plays. Shakespear’s characters act from mixed motives, and are made what they are by various circumstances. Massinger’s characters act from single motives, and become what they are, and remain so, by a pure effort of the will, in spite of circumstances. This last author endeavoured to embody an abstract principle; labours hard to bring out the same individual trait in its most exaggerated state; and the force of his impassioned characters arises for the most part, from the obstinacy with which they exclude every other feeling. Their vices look of a gigantic stature from their standing alone. Their actions seem extravagant from their having always the same fixed aim—the same incorrigible purpose. The fault of Sir Giles Overreach, in this respect, is less in the excess to which he pushes a favourite propensity, than in the circumstance of its being unmixed with any other virtue or vice.
‘We may find the same simplicity of dramatic conception in the comic as in the tragic characters of the author. Justice Greedy has but one idea or subject in his head throughout. He is always eating, or talking of eating. His belly is always in his mouth, and we know nothing of him but his appetite; he is as sharpset as travellers from off a journey. His land of promise touches on the borders of the wilderness: his thoughts are constantly in apprehension of feasting or famishing. A fat turkey floats before his imagination in royal state, and his hunger sees visions of chines of beef, venison pasties, and Norfolk dumplings, as if it were seized with a calenture. He is a very amusing personage; and in what relates to eating and drinking, as peremptory as Sir Giles himself.—Marrall is another instance of confined comic humour, whose ideas never wander beyond the ambition of being the implicit drudge of another’s knavery or good fortune. He sticks to his stewardship, and resists the favour of a salute from a fine lady as not entered in his accounts. The humour of this character is less striking in the play than in Munden’s personification of it. The other characters do not require any particular analysis. They are very insipid, good sort of people.’
25.
26. ‘High as our heart.’—See passage from the Malcontent.
27. Or never known one otherwise than patient.
28. Sonnet to Cambridge, by Charles Lamb.
29. The name of Still has been assigned as the author of this singular production, with the date of 1566.
30. So in Rochester’s Epigram.
31. His mistress.
32. Scotch for send’st, for complain’st, &c.
33. ‘I was all ear,’ see Milton’s Comus.
34. Chapman’s Hymn to Pan.
35. Alluding to the fulfilment of the prophecies and the birth of the Messiah.
36. ‘He spreads his sail-broad vans.’—Par. Lost, b. ii. l. 927.
37. See Satan’s reception on his return to Pandemonium, in book X. of Paradise Lost.
38. Sir Thomas Brown has it, ‘The huntsmen are up in America,’ but Mr. Coleridge prefers reading Arabia. I do not think his account of the Urn-Burial very happy. Sir Thomas can be said to be ‘wholly in his subject,’ only because he is wholly out of it. There is not a word in the Hydriotaphia about ‘a thigh-bone, or a skull, or a bit of mouldered coffin, or a tomb-stone, or a ghost, or a winding-sheet, or an echo,’ nor is ‘a silver nail or a gilt anno domini the gayest thing you shall meet with.’ You do not meet with them at all in the text; nor is it possible, either from the nature of the subject, or of Sir T. Brown’s mind, that you should! He chose the subject of Urn-Burial, because it was ‘one of no mark or likelihood,’ totally free from the romantic prettinesses and pleasing poetical common-places with which Mr. Coleridge has adorned it, and because, being ‘without form and void,’ it gave unlimited scope to his high-raised and shadowy imagination. The motto of this author’s compositions might be—‘De apparentibus et non existentibus eadem est ratio.’ He created his own materials: or to speak of him in his own language, ‘he saw nature in the elements of its chaos, and discerned his favourite notions in the great obscurity of nothing!‘
39. The above passage is an inimitably fine paraphrase of some lines on the tombs in Westminster Abbey by F. Beaumont. It shows how near Jeremy Taylor’s style was to poetry, and how well it weaves in with it.
40. He and his wife both died from fright, occasioned by the great fire of London in 1665, and lie buried in St. Giles’s church-yard.
41. The difference in the tone of moral sentiment is the greatest of all others.