Shakespeare began by imitating the prevailing theatrical style of the time.  He wrote in much the same way as those before and about him did, till by experience and practice he found out a better way of his own.  It is even doubtful whether his first imitations surpassed his models.  In Titus Andronicus, the First Part of King Henry the Sixth, and The Comedy of Errors, if there be any thing of the right Shakespearian idiom, it is so overlaid by what he had caught from others as to be hardly discoverable.  Accordingly those pieces seem to me little better than worthless, save as specimens of his apprentice-work.  In The Two Gentlemen of Verona, also, Loves Labour’s Lost, and The Taming of the Shrew, imitation has decidedly the upper hand; though in these plays, especially the latter, we have clear prognostics of the forthcoming dramatic divinity.  From thence onward his style kept growing less imitative and more idiomatic till not the least taste or relish of the former remained.  So that in this respect his course was in fact just what might be expected from a thoroughly modest, teachable, receptive, and at the same time most living, active, and aspiring mind,—­a mind full indeed of native boldness, but yet restrained by judgment and good sense from the crudeness and temerity of self-will and eccentric impulse, and not trusting to its own strength till it had better reasons for doing so than the promptings of vanity and egotism.

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It is to this process of imitation that the Poet’s faults of style are to be mainly ascribed; though in the end it was no doubt in a great measure the source of his excellences also.  For, taking his works in the order of their production, we can perceive very clearly that his faults of style kept disappearing as he became more and more himself.  He advanced in the path of improvement by slow tentative methods, and was evidently careful not to deviate from what was before him till he saw unmistakably how he could do better.  As he was thus “most severe in fashion and collection of himself”; so he worked in just the true way for disciplining and regulating his genius into power; and so in due time he had a good right to be “as clear and confident as Jove.”

Shakespeare’s faults of style, especially in his earlier plays, are neither few nor small.  Among these are to be reckoned, of course, his frequent quibbles and plays upon words, his verbal conceits and affectations, his equivoques and clinches.  Many of these are palpable sins against manliness; not a few of them are decidedly puerile; the results of an epidemic of trifling and of fanciful prettiness.  Some critics, it is true, have strained a point, if not several points, in defence of them; but it seems to me that a fair-minded criticism has no way but to set them down as plain blemishes and disfigurements.  And our right, nay, our duty to call them such is