This, notwithstanding it is defended by so sound a critic as Schlegel, seems to me a decided blot; I cannot accept it as right either in itself or on the score of dramatic fitness.  Many like instances occur in Romeo and Juliet, King John, and other plays of that period; instances which I cannot help regarding not only as breaches of good taste in the speakers, but as plain faults of style in the Poet himself:  the blame of them indeed properly rests with him, not with the persons; for they are out of keeping with the sentiments of the occasion, and jar on the feelings which the surrounding matter inspires; that is, they are sins against dramatic propriety, as well as against honest manliness of style:  so that, however the pressure of the age may account for them, it must not be taken as excusing them; and the best we can say on this point is, that in his faults of style the Poet went with the custom and fashion of his time, while in his virtues he went quite above and beyond the time.

Near akin to these are other faults of still graver import.  In his earlier plays, the Poet’s style is often, not to say generally, at least in the more serious parts, rather rhetorical than rightly dramatic.  The persons often lay themselves out in what may not unfairly be called speech-making.  Their use of language is highly self-conscious, and abounds in marks of elaborateness, as if their mind were more intent on the figure they are making than on what they are talking about:  so that the right colloquial tone is lost in a certain ambitious, oratorical, got-up manner of speech; and we feel a want of that plain, native, spontaneous talk wherein heart and tongue keep touch and time together:  in short, they speak rather as authors having an audience in view than as men and women moved by the real passions and interests of life.

The reason of all this I take to be, that the Poet himself was at that time highly self-conscious in his use of language.  His art was then too young to lose itself in the enthusiasm of Truth and Nature; and, as remarked before, he seems to have felt no little pleasure in the tokens of his own skill.  Thus, in his earlier plays, written before he had fully found himself, the arts and motives of authorship are but too apparent:  he was then, I should say, somewhat in the humour of flirting with the Muses and Graces; which, because it lacks the modesty and delicacy of genuine passion, therefore naturally runs into that excess of manner and style which is commonly called “fine writing.”  And it is a very note-worthy point, that when he studies most for effect, then it is that we find him least effective.  But here too, as in the matter mentioned before, his fault was clearly the result of imitation, not of character.  Accordingly, in the earnestness of his work, he gradually outgrew it.  In the plays of his later period, the fault disappears entirely; there is not a vestige of it left:  in fact, this fault is mainly revealed to us by the higher standard