And if there

best serve its proper end by calling them so. be any good apology for them, doubtless it is, that they grew from the general custom and conventional pressure of the time, and were written before the Poet had by practice and experience worked himself above custom into the original strength and rectitude of his genius. I care not how much they are set down as faults of the age, not of the man, so they do not pass for other than faults. And I submit that any unsophisticated criticism, however liberal and broad, will naturally regard them as the effects of imitation, not of mental character, because they are out of keeping with the general style of the piece, and strike against the grain of the sentiment which that style inspires. We experience an unpleasant hitch of the sympathies whenever we come upon those passages; as if the author were obtruding his own crotchets upon us, instead of leaving us to the native and free transpiration of his characters. It should be noted withal, that the fault disappears after the third Act, and is met with in none of those passages which were new in the second edition.

Bating certain considerable drawbacks on this score, the play gives the impression of having been all conceived and struck out in the full heat and glow of youthful passion; as if the Poet's genius were for the time thoroughly possessed with the spirit and temper of the subject; while at the same time the passion is so pervaded with the light and grace of imagination, that it kindles only to ennoble and exalt. For richness of poetical colouring,- dispensed with lavish hand indeed, but yet so managed as not to interfere either with the development of character or the proper dramatic effect, but rather to help them both, it may challenge a comparison with any of the Poet's dramas.

Of course, this play as a whole derives its character and idiom from the passion of the hero and heroine, all the parts being fused together in the energy of that. It is therefore as much a tragedy of love as Hamlet is a tragedy

of thought. And it is the only one of Shakespeare's plays which proceeds, throughout, with supreme reference that passion. Touching the unity of feeling which marks this drama, an unity that has both its organic law and its efficient cause in that same passion, Coleridge has a strain of criticism that ought always to go with the subject: "Read Romeo and Juliet: all is youth and Spring; youth with its follies, its virtues, its precipitances; Spring with its odours, its flowers, and its transiency: it is one and the same feeling that commences, goes through, and ends the play. The old men, the Capulets ande Montagues, are not common old men; they have an eagerness, a heartiness, a vehemence, the effect of Spring: with Romeo, his change of passion, his sudden marriage, and his rash death, are all the effects of youth; whilst in Juliet love has all that is tender and melancholy in the nightingale, all that is voluptuous in the rose, with whatever is sweet in the freshness of Spring; but it ends with a long deep sigh, like the last breeze of an Italian evening."

In accordance with what is here noted, we find every thing on the run; all the passions of the drama are in the same fiery-footed and unmanageable excess: the impatient vehemence of old Capulet, the furious valour of Tybalt, the * brilliant volubility of Mercutio, the petulant loquacity of the Nurse, being all but so many issues of the reigning irritability and impetuosity. Amid this general stress of impassioned life, old animosities are rekindled, old feuds have broken out anew; while the efforts of private friendship and public authority to quench the strife only go to prove it unquenchable, the same violent passions that have caused the tumults being brought to the suppression of them. The prevalence of extreme hate serves of course to generate the opposite extreme; out of the most passionate and fatal enmities there naturally springs a love as passionate and fatal. With dispositions too gentle and noble to share in the animosities so rife about them, the hearts of the lovers are rendered thereby the more alive and

open to impressions of a contrary nature; the fierce rancour of their Houses only swelling in them the emotions that prevent their sympathizing with it.

Thus the Poet carries us smoothly along through all the aching joys and giddy transports of the lovers, by his manner of disposing the objects and persons about them; the leading passion, intense as it is, being so associated with others of like intensity, that we receive it without any sense of disproportion to nature; whereas, if cut out of the harmony in which it moves, it would seem overwrought and improbable. For who does not see how the feelings are here raised and sustained by a continuity of impression running from person to person, and thus authenticating the whole? In other words, we have no difficulty in symp thizing with the main part, because all the parts are in sympathy with each other. And the Poet secures this result with so much ease as not to betray his exertions; his means are hidden in the skill with which he uses them; and we forget the height to which he soars, because he has the strength of wing to bear us along with him, or rather gives us wings to rise with him of ourselves.

One of the plainest things in human life, and yet one of the hardest for men to learn, is, that Nature will have her course in one shape or another. The more you put down her rights, the more you will be put down in turn by her wrongs. If you repress her native passions by factitious rules and manners, first you know those passions will somehow combine with your machinery of repression: the very prison of ice, with which you think to freeze up her outlets, will nurse an inward volcano, to explode against you. And such is the general condition of life depicted in this drama. It is a most artificial state of society, where all the safetyvalves of nature are closed up by an oppressive conventionality, and where the better passions, being clogged down to their source, have turned their strength into the worse. People must live all by rule, nothing by instinct; that is,

their life is to be a form impressed from without, not unfolded from within. But the spontaneous forces of nature will assert themselves either for good or for evil. We have a choice outcropping of this in the first scene of the play; where it is evident that the underlings of the two Houses have caught the fury of their masters, and are spiteful and quarrelsome for no other reason than that their natural fires are so much stifled beneath the artificial crust. They must needs fight, because to ape their betters has become a passion with them; which could hardly be the case, but that passion and imitation have got forced into an unnatural mixture or alliance; for it is against the proper instinct of passion to be imitative.

To take another view of the matter: Principle and impulse are often spoken of as opposed to each other. And, as men are, such is indeed too often the case; but in ingenuous natures, and in well-ordered societies, the two grow forth together, each serving to unfold and deepen the other; so that we have principle warmed into impulse, and impulse fixed into principle. This gives us what may be described as a character informed with noble passions. And, say what we will, bad passions will have the mastery of a man, unless there be good ones to countervail them. For Reason, do the best she can, is not enough: men must love; and their proper safeguard is in having their love married to truth and virtue. When such is the case, the state of man is at peace and unity: otherwise, he is a house divided against itself, where principle and impulse strive each for supremacy, and rule by turns; headlong and sensual in his passions, cunning and selfish in his reason.

Now this fatal divorce of reason and passion is the rule of life as represented in this drama. The generous impulses of nature are overborne and stifled by a discipline of selfishness. Boldly calculative where they ought to be impassioned, people are of course blindly passionate where they ought to be deliberate and cool. Even marriage is plainly stripped of its sacredness, made an affair of expediency, not

of religion, insomuch that a previous union of hearts is discouraged, lest it should interfere with a prudent union of hands. Thus the hearts of the young are, if possible, kept sealed against all deep and strong impressions, and the development of the nobler impulses foreclosed by the icy considerations of interest and policy. Think you that Nature can with impunity be thus oppressed? She will revolt.

Amidst this heart-withering tyranny of custom, the hero and heroine stand out the unschooled and unspoiled creatures of native sense and native sensibility. Art has tried its utmost upon them, but Nature has proved too strong for✔ it. In the silent creativeness of youth their feelings have insensibly matured themselves; and they come before us glowing with the warmth of natural sentiment, with susceptibilities deep as life, and waiting only for the kindling touch of passion. To go through life with a set of feelings ready-made, brewed together for social convenience, and then pumped into them, was a destiny which, from their innate strength of soul, they could not embrace. So that they exemplify the simplicity of nature thriving amidst the most artificial manners: nay, they are the more natural for the excess of art around them; as if nature, driven from the hearts of others, had taken refuge in theirs.

Principle, however, is as strong in them as passion: they have the purity as well as the impulsiveness of nature; and because they are free from immodest desires, therefore they put forth no angelic pretensions. Idolizing each other, they would nevertheless make none but permitted offerings. Not being led by the conventionalities of life, they therefore are not to be misled by them: as their hearts are joined in mutual love, so their hands must be joined in mutual honour; for, while loving each other with a love as boundless as the sea, they at the same time love in each other whatsoever is pure and precious in their unsoiled imaginations. Thus their fault lies, not in the nature of their passion, but in its excess, that they love each other in a