——­’The seas
    Which God hath given for fence impregnable’

to the poet’s England.  It is idle to say that Shakspeare was inland-bred—­that he knew nothing, and could therefore have cared nothing about the matter—­seeing that, insensible as he might have been to its beauties, he makes constant reference to the sea, and even in language implying that his familiarity with it was not inferior to that of any yachtsman who has ever sailed out of Cowes Harbour.  He uses nautical terms frequently and appropriately.  Romeo’s rope-ladder is ‘the high top-gallant of his joy;’ King John, dying of poison, declares ‘the tackle of his heart is cracked,’ and ’all the shrouds wherewith his life should sail’ wasted ‘to a thread.’  Polonius tells Laertes, ’the wind sits in the shoulder of your sail’—­a technical expression, the singular propriety of which a naval critic has recently established; whilst some of the commentators on the passage in King Lear, descriptive of the prospect from Dover Cliffs, affirm that the comparison as to apparent size, of the ship to her cock-boat, and the cock-boat to a buoy, discover a perfect knowledge of the relative proportions of the objects named.  In Hamlet, Othello, The Tempest, The Merchant of Venice, The Comedy of Errors, Twelfth Night, Winter’s Tale, Measure for Measure, and Pericles, sea-storms are made accessory to the development of the plot, and sometimes described with a force and truthfulness which forbid the belief that the writer had never witnessed such scenes:  however, like Horace, it is in the darkest colours that Shakspeare uniformly paints ‘the multitudinous seas.’

In the Winter’s Tale, we read of—­

             ——­’the fearful usage
    (Albeit ungentle) of the dreadful Neptune.’

In Henry V., of ‘the furrowed sea,’ ‘the lofty surge,’ ’the inconstant billows dancing;’ in Henry VI., Queen Margaret finds in the roughness of the English waters a presage of her approaching wo; in Richard III., Clarence’s dream figures to us all the horrors of ‘the vasty deep;’ in Henry VIII., Wolsey indeed speaks of ’a sea of glory,’ but also of his shipwreck thereon; in The Tempest we read of ‘the never surfeited sea,’ and of the ’sea-marge sterile and rocky-hard;’ in the Midsummer’s Night Dream, ‘the sea’ is ‘rude,’ and from it the winds ‘suck up contagious fogs;’ Hamlet is as ’mad as the sea and wind;’ the violence of Laertes and the insurgent Danes is paralleled to an irruption of the sea, ‘overpeering of his list;’ in the well-known soliloquy is the expression, ‘a sea of troubles,’ which, in spite of Pope’s suggested and tasteless emendation, commentators have shewn to have been used proverbially by the Greeks, and more than once by AEschylus and Menander.  Still, Shakspeare, again like Horace, was not insensible to the merits of sea-air in a sanitary point of view.  Dionyza, meditating Marina’s murder, bids her take what the Brighton doctor’s call ‘a constitutional’ by the sea-side, adding that—­