engrossing death!—­
     Come, bitter conduct, come unsavoury guide! 
     Thou desperate pilot, now at once run on
     The dashing rocks my sea-sick weary bark! 
     Here’s to my love!—­[Drinks.] O, true apothecary! 
     Thy drugs are quick.—­Thus with a kiss I die.

The lines in this speech describing the loveliness of Juliet, who is supposed to be dead, have been compared to those in which it is said of Cleopatra after her death, that she looked ’as she would take another Antony in her strong toil of grace;’ and a question has been started which is the finest, that we do not pretend to decide.  We can more easily decide between Shakespeare and any other author, than between him and himself.—­Shall we quote any more passages to show his genius or the beauty of Romeo and Juliet?  At that rate, we might quote the whole.  The late Mr. Sheridan, on being shown a volume of the Beauties of Shakespeare, very properly asked—­’But where are the other eleven?’ The character of Mercutio in this play is one of the most mercurial and spirited of the productions of Shakespeare’s comic muse.

LEAR

We wish that we could pass this play over, and say nothing about it.  All that we can say must fall far short of the subject; or even of what we ourselves conceive of it.  To attempt to give a description of the play itself or of its effect upon the mind, is mere impertinence:  yet we must say something.—­It is then the best of all Shakespeare’s plays, for it is the one in which he was the most in earnest.  He was here fairly caught in the web of his own imagination.  The passion which he has taken as his subject is that which strikes its root deepest into the human heart; of which the bond is the hardest to be unloosed; and the cancelling and tearing to pieces of which gives the greatest revulsion to the frame.  This depth of nature, this force of passion, this tug and war of the elements of our being, this firm faith in filial piety, and the giddy anarchy and whirling tumult of the thoughts at finding this prop failing it, the contrast between the fixed, immoveable basis of natural affection, and the rapid, irregular starts of imagination, suddenly wrenched from all its accustomed holds and resting-places in the soul, this is what Shakespeare has given, and what nobody else but he could give.  So we believe.—­The mind of Lear staggering between the weight of attachment and the hurried movements of passion is like a tall ship driven about by the winds, buffeted by the furious waves, but that still rides above the storm, having its anchor fixed in the bottom of the sea; or it is like the sharp rock circled by the eddying whirlpool that foams and beats against it, or like the solid promontory pushed from its basis by the force of an earthquake.