of ordered pomp; specimens of terse, restrained, yet rhythmical, and finely-modulated vigour; specimens of the most copious and varied choral harmony; specimens of the most quiet, simple, and pure-flowing melody; now a full burst of the many-voiced lordly organ, now the softest and mellowest notes of the flute.  Not only these, but all the intermediate, and ever so many surrounding varieties of structure are met with in his omniformity of sentence-building.  In short, the leaves of a forest are hardly more varied in figure and make than Shakespeare’s sentences; so that if these were all sorted into rhetorical classes, and named, it would “dizzy the arithmetic of memory” to run through their names.

The only divisions on this score that I shall attempt to speak of are those called the Period and the Loose Sentence.  Everybody knows, I presume, that in a periodic sentence, when rightly fashioned, the sense is not completed till you reach the close; so that the whole has to be formed in thought before any part is set down.  The beginning forecasts the end, the end remembers the beginning, and all the intermediate parts are framed with an eye to both beginning and end.  And the nearer it comes to a regular circle, the better it is held to be.  This style of writing, then, may be not unfitly said to go on wheels.  It is naturally rolling and high-sounding, or at least may easily be made so, and therefore is apt to be in favour with geniuses of a swelling, oratorical, and elocutionary order.  Besides, it is a style easily imitated, and so is not unfavourable to autorial equality.  On the other hand, the Loose Sentence begins without any apparent thought of how it is to end, and proceeds with as little apparent thought of how it began:  the sense may stand complete many times before it gets through:  it runs on seemingly at random, winding at its “own sweet will,” though the path it holds is much nearer a straight line than a circle; and it stops, not where the starting foresaw, but where the matter so carries it.  Thus it is a sort of lingual straggler, if you please, and may be said to wander with little or no conscience of the rhetorical toilet.

Shakespeare has many periodic sentences:  at first he seems to have rather affected that structure:  in the more serious parts of the plays written in his earlier style it is so common as to be almost characteristic of them.  But, on the whole, he evidently much preferred writing in straight lines to writing in circles; and this preference grew stronger as he ripened in his art; so that in his later workmanship the periodic construction becomes decidedly rare:  and the reason of his so preferring the linear to the circular structure seems to have been, not only because the former is the more natural and spontaneous way of speaking, but also because it offers far more scope for the proper freedom and variety of English colloquial speech.  He has numberless sentences of exquisite beauty of structure; many indeed of the