injurious it was, and visited it with open condemnation. In Twelfth Night, after making the Clown quibble for three speeches, to Viola's bewilderment, upon two words, he makes the same character exclaim, "To see this age! A sentence is but a cheveril glove to a good wit. How quickly the wrong side may be turned outward!" To which Viola replies, Nay, that's certain: they that dally nicely with words may quickly make them wanton." This is one of the very few passages in his plays which may safely be accepted as a mere expression of his own opinions.

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But the fashion of his day, at Shakespeare's conformity to which we must chiefly rejoice, was that of using blank verse instead of rhyme in dramatic composition. His choice, doubtless, went with his conformity; but that he yielded in this respect to fashion is plain from the facts that his earlier plays abound in rhymed passages, a great part of one of them, The Comedy of Errors, being in couplets or alternate rhymes, and that he used blank verse only in his plays. Blank verse had been slowly growing in favor with our English poets ever since Surrey used it for his translation of the fourth book of the Æneid, forty years before Shakespeare entered upon his career. At the latter period it was coming into vogue upon the stage, and Shakespeare, who in all that he wrote to set forth as poetry chose rhyme, soon became, in his dramas, the greatest master of English heroic measure. Not much can be said, and if there could, not much need be said, in an attempt to appreciate Shakespeare's genius, of the beauty of his versification. Criticism can do no more than record its various and surpassing beauty. The mere structure of verse is mechanical. It can be, it has been, made perfect by rule. Much good sense has been written in lines composed of five feet of two syllables, with accent duly

disposed and tastefully and correctly varied, which are unexceptionable verses, quite as perfect as any that Shakespeare ever wrote. But they are, most of them, a weariness to the flesh, while his delight our ears forever. The reason of this difference it is impossible to set forth. We can no more say why it is than we can say why, when one composer writes a succession of notes which follow each other in perfect conformity to the rules of music, the canons of taste, as well as the laws of composition, we say with Sly, "A very excellent piece of work: would 'twere done," and when Mozart writes, conforming to no other laws, he ravishes our souls with melody. The power over sound, whether of words or musical notes, is a personal gift, which, unlike other personal gifts, such as wisdom, logical power, imagination, the mastery of form, as in sculpture and architecture, or of color, as in painting and decoration, is exercised (within certain general limits) purely according to the personal fancy, the spontaneous and intuitive preference of the possessor. The poet, in the sensuous expression of his verse, is guided only by his own sense of what is fit and beautiful. We can see that he attains his purpose by the variation of his pauses, the balance of his sentences, and his choice and arrangement of words in regard to sound. But why and how he does this we cannot tell; nor could he tell himself. We can test one of Shakespeare's characters by the laws of our moral nature; but we have no laws, except those before mentioned, which refer to the rudiments and mechanism of the art, by which we can test the sensuous beauties of his poetry. Except in his songs, he wrote almost entirely in one kind of verse; and he wrote that as he willed; his variations of style, in this respect, resulting only from the greater or less freedom which he allowed himself, guided only by his innate exquisite sense of the beautiful. He

had no literary criticism to fear, (it cannot be too constantly kept in mind;) and the success of his plays was not with a public who read, but with an audience who listened. Therefore he admitted hemistichs, defective and redundant lines, the alternation of verse with prose, and of rhymes with blank verse; conscious that so long as the dialogue ran easily and naturally on, the audience would concern themselves with the story, the situations, and the thoughts and feelings of the personages, indifferent to the niceties of versification, which indeed only a reader could detect. In respect to the strict laws of versification, the dramatic poet of the days of Elizabeth was a chartered libertine. Shakespeare availed himself of this freedom to the full; and we can see that as he grew older he allowed himself greater license, the effect of which relaxation was counterbalanced and modified by his greater mastery of the material in which he worked, and his more refined perceptions of beauty. The plays which we know were his latest productions, such as The Winter's Tale, Coriolanus, and Henry the Eighth, are notably freer, free almost to carelessness, when compared with The Two Gentlemen of Verona and King Richard the Second, for instance, which we know were of his early writing. In some of the Roman plays, and in King Henry the Eighth, he reaches the point of almost failing to mark his verse by any cæsural or final pause whatever; very often allowing the place of the last accent to be filled by a syllable, frequently a monosyllabic word, which cannot be accented. It is true that the rhythm of all modern poetry depends merely upon accent, and that the English language has among its happy distinctions that of containing no word which is unfit for poetry. But the facility given by these traits is shared in the first instance by all modern poets, in the second by all English poets.

Yet of all English, as well as of all modern poets, Shakespeare, in respect to his versification as in all other respects, is the supreme master. The rhythm of his verse and the cadence of his periods are determined by an exquisite sense of the beauty of verbal form, working with an intuitive, though not unconscious, power of adaptation of form to spirit.

synonyme

Like in the irresponsibility and absoluteness of its operation to the faculty of melodious versification is that faculty which we call fancy, touching Shakespeare's exercise of which somewhat has necessarily been said already. Fancy is defined by Johnson as "the power by which the mind forms to itself images of things, persons, or scenes of being," and he gives imagination as its and first definition; by Webster, as "the faculty by which the mind forms images or representations of things at pleasure;" by Worcester, as "the faculty of combining ideas;" and some metaphysicians, attempting to draw a distinction between fancy and imagination, have attributed to the former faculty the power of forming images or representations of things in the mind, to the latter that of combining and modifying them. If these definitions were correct and sufficient, fancy could not be considered with propriety as a trait of style; which is in poet, painter, or musician, the mode of expression. It would belong to the substance of an author's work, that which style expresses. But the definitions in question, to which all others known to me conform without essential variation, must be set aside as expressing neither the idea of fancy which is presented by our best writers of any age, nor that which has determined the general use of the word among intelligent people.

This is not the place in which to go into extended dissertation upon the characteristic traits and differences of fancy and imagination; but it may be briefly said.

that if fancy' were ever correctly used as a synonyme of imagination,' which is more than doubtful, or as the name of a creative, image-forming faculty, that usage has long since passed away, and that the needs of intelligent people have effected a distinction between the two words, similar in kind to that which has been made between talent' and 'genius.' Carlyle, for instance, is celebrated as a writer of vivid and powerful imagination; but no person of ordinary discrimination would speak of fancy as one of his characteristic mental traits. So the style of A Midsummer-Night's Dream is peculiarly rich and brilliant in fancy; but except in the personages of Puck and the clowns, it is not distinguished among Shakespeare's plays for imagination, which, as exhibited in his works, finds its highest manifestation in King Lear, Macbeth, and The Tempest. In brief, imagination is that creative faculty of the mind by which images of men and things, and their relations, are conceived and brought forth with seeming reality. It is the correlative of faith, which is the substance of things hoped for, and the evidence of things not seen. Fancy is the faculty which illustrates, enriches, and adorns a person, a thing, or a statement of fact or truth by association, comparison, and by attributed function or action. Never did intellectual wealth equal in degree the boundless riches of Shakespeare's fancy. He compelled all nature and all art, all that God had revealed and all that man had discovered, to contribute materials to enrich his style- to enforce his thought; so that the entire range of human knowledge must be laid under contribution to illustrate his writings. This inexhaustible mine of fancy -- furnishing metaphor, comparison, illustration, impersonation, in ceaseless alternation, often intermingled, so that the one cannot be severed from the other, although the combination is