Daffodils
    That come before the swallow dares, and take
    The winds of March with beauty; violets dim,
    But sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes,
    Or Cytherea’s breath.—­

No one who does not feel the passion which these objects inspire can go along with the imagination which seeks to express that passion and the uneasy sense of delight accompanying it by something still more beautiful, and no one can feel this passionate love of nature without quick natural sensibility.  To a mere literal and formal apprehension, the inimitably characteristic epithet, ‘violets dim’, must seem to imply a defect, rather than a beauty; and to any one, not feeling the full force of that epithet, which suggests an image like ‘the sleepy eye of love’, the allusion to ’the lids of Juno’s eyes’ must appear extravagant and unmeaning.  Shakespeare’s fancy lent words and images to the most refined sensibility to nature, struggling for expression:  his descriptions are identical with the things themselves, seen through the fine medium of passion:  strip them of that connexion, and try them by ordinary conceptions and ordinary rules, and they are as grotesque and barbarous as you please!—­By thus lowering Shakespeare’s genius to the standard of common-place invention, it was easy to show that his faults were as great as his beauties; for the excellence, which consists merely in a conformity to rules, is counterbalanced by the technical violation of them.  Another circumstance which led to Dr. Johnson’s indiscriminate praise or censure of Shakespeare, is the very structure of his style.  Johnson wrote a kind of rhyming prose, in which he was as much compelled to finish the different clauses of his sentences, and to balance one period against another, as the writer of heroic verse is to keep to lines of ten syllables with similar terminations.  He no sooner acknowledges the merits of his author in one line than the periodical revolution in his style carries the weight of his opinion completely over to the side of objection, thus keeping up a perpetual alternation of perfections and absurdities.

We do not otherwise know how to account for such assertions as the following:  ’In his tragic scenes, there is always something wanting, but his comedy often surpasses expectation or desire.  His comedy pleases by the thoughts and the language, and his tragedy, for the greater part, by incident and action.  His tragedy seems to be skill, his comedy to be instinct.’  Yet after saying that ’his tragedy was skill’, he affirms in the next page, ’His declamations or set speeches are commonly cold and weak, for his power was the power of nature:  when he endeavoured, like other tragic writers, to catch opportunities of amplification, and instead of inquiring what the occasion demanded, to show how much his stores of knowledge could supply, he seldom escapes without the pity or resentment of his reader.’  Poor Shakespeare!