lingua; but how lifeless and odourless the whole thing! how all the soul of nature, which now throbs so eloquently in it, would have been dried and crimped out of it!  The workmanship, in short, to borrow an illustration from Schlegel, would have been like the mimic gardens of children; who, eager to see the work of their hands, break off twigs and flowers, and stick them in the ground; which done, the childish gardener struts proudly up and down his showy beds.

Perhaps the Poet’s autocratic overshooting of grammar and rhetoric is still better instanced in the same play, v. 3, where Posthumus relates the doings of old Belarius and the Princes in a certain lane.  On being asked, “Where was this lane?” he replies: 

“Close by the battle, ditch’d, and wall’d with turf; Which gave advantage to an ancient soldier,—­ An honest one, I warrant; who deserv’d So long a breeding as his white beard came to, In doing this for ’s country:  athwart the lane, He, with two striplings,—­lads more like to run The country base than to commit such slaughter; With faces fit for masks, or rather fairer Than those for preservation cas’d or shame,—­ Made good the passage; cried to those that fled, Our Britain’s harts die flying, not our men.”

And so on to the end of the speech; which is all, from first to last, as glorious in conception and imagery as it is reckless of rhetorical form.

* * * * *

I am next to say somewhat touching the Poet’s sentence-building, this being a matter that rhetoricians make much of; though in this, also, I must in the outset acquit him of any practical respect for the rulings of courts rhetorical.  For here, again, he has no set fashion, no preferred pattern, no oft-recurring form; nothing at all stereotyped or modish; but just ranges at large in all the unchartered freedom and versatility of the English colloquial idiom.  You may find in him sentences of every possible construction; but, except in his early plays, you can hardly say that he took to any one mould of structure more than another.  So that his most peculiar feature here is absence of peculiarity.  Thought dominates absolutely the whole material of expression, working it, shaping it, out-and-out, as clay in the potter’s hands; which has no character but what it receives from the occasion and purpose of the user.  As the Poet cares for nothing but to “suit the action to the word, the word to the action,” so his word takes on forms as various as the action of his persons; nay, more; is pliant to all their moods and tenses of thought, passion, feeling, and volition.  Thus, in the structure of his sentences, as in other things, his language is strictly physiognomic of his matter, the speaking exterior of the inward life; which life is indeed the one sole organizing principle of it.  Accordingly he has specimens of the most pithy, piercing, sententious brevity; specimens with all the ample and rich magnificence