general, Shakespeare’s style yet remains the very best model, both in the vigorous and sublime, and the pleasing and tender.  In his sphere he has exhausted all the means and appliances of language.  On all he has impressed the stamp of his mighty spirit.  His images and figures, in their unsought, nay, uncapricious singularity, have often a sweetness altogether peculiar.  He becomes occasionally obscure from too great fondness for compressed brevity; but still, the labor of poring over Shakespeare’s lines will invariably meet an ample requital.

The verse in all his plays is generally the rhymeless iambic of ten or eleven syllables, only occasionally intermixed with rhymes, but more frequently alternating with prose.  No one piece is written entirely in prose; for even in those which approach the most to the pure Comedy, there is always something added which gives them a more poetical hue than usually belongs to this species.  Many scenes are wholly in prose, in others verse and prose succeed each other alternately.  This can appear an impropriety only in the eyes of those who are accustomed to consider the lines of a drama like so many soldiers drawn up rank and file on a parade, with the same uniform, arms, and accoutrements, so that when we see one or two we may represent to ourselves thousands as being every way like them.

In the use of verse and prose Shakespeare observes very nice distinctions according to the ranks of the speakers, but still more according to their characters and disposition of mind.  A noble language, elevated above the usual tone, is suitable only to a certain decorum of manners, which is thrown over both vices and virtues and which does not even wholly disappear amidst the violence of passion.  If this is not exclusively possessed by the higher ranks, it still, however, belongs naturally more to them than to the lower; and therefore, in Shakespeare, dignity and familiarity of language, poetry, and prose, are in this manner distributed among the characters.  Hence his tradesmen, peasants, soldiers, sailors, servants, but more especially his fools and clowns, speak, almost without exception, in the tone of their actual life.  However, inward dignity of sentiment, wherever it is possessed, invariably displays itself with a nobleness of its own, and stands not in need, for that end, of the artificial elegancies of education and custom; it is a universal right of man, of the highest as well as the lowest; and hence also, in Shakespeare, the nobility of nature and morality is ennobled above the artificial nobility of society.  Not infrequently also he makes the very same persons express themselves at times in the sublimest language, and at others in the lowest; and this inequality is in like manner founded in truth.  Extraordinary situations, which intensely occupy the head and throw mighty passions into play, give elevation and tension to the soul:  it collects all its powers and exhibits an unusual energy, both in its operations and in its