But though this moral be incidentally enforced, Shakespeare has suffered the virtue of Cordelia to perish in a just cause contrary to the natural ideas of justice, to the hope of the reader, and, what is yet more strange, to the faith of chronicles.  Yet this conduct is justified by the Spectator, who blames Tate for giving Cordelia success and happiness in his alteration, and declares, that, in his opinion, the tragedy has lost half its beauty.  Dennis has remarked, whether justly or not, that, to secure the favourable reception of Cato, “the town was poisoned with much false and abominable criticism,” and that endeavours had been used to discredit and decry poetical justice.  A play in which the wicked prosper, and the virtuous miscarry, may doubtless be good, because it is a just representation of the common events of human life:  but since all reasonable beings naturally love justice, I cannot easily be persuaded, that the observation of justice makes a play worse; or, that if other excellencies are equal, the audience will not always rise better pleased from the final triumph of persecuted virtue.

In the present case the publick has decided.  Cordelia, from the time of Tate, has always retired with victory and felicity.  And, if my sensations could add any thing to the general suffrage, I might relate, that I was many years ago so shocked by Cordelia’s death, that I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them as an editor.

ROMEO AND JULIET

Act I. Scene ii. (I. i. 181 foll.)

     Why then, O brawling love!  O loving hate! &c.

Of these lines neither the sense nor occasion is very evident.  He is not yet in love with an enemy, and to love one and hate another is no such uncommon state, as can deserve all this toil of antithesis.

Act I. Scene iii. (I. ii. 25.)

     Earth-treading stars that make dark HEAVEN’s light.

This nonsense should be reformed thus,

     Earth-treading stars that make dark even light. 
                    —­Warburton.

But why nonsense?  Is anything more commonly said, than that beauties eclipse the sun?  Has not Pope the thought and the word?

     Sol through white curtains shot a tim’rous ray,
     And ope’d those eyes that must eclipse the day.

Both the old and the new reading are philosophical nonsense, but they are both, and both equally poetical sense.

Act I. Scene iii. (I. ii. 26-8.)

     Such comfort as do lusty young men feel,
     When well-apparel’d April on the heel
     Of limping winter treads.

To say, and to say in pompous words, that a “young man shall feel” as much in an assembly of beauties, “as young men feel in the month of April,” is surely to waste sound upon a very poor sentiment.  I read, Such comfort as do lusty yeomen feel.  You shall feel from the sight and conversation of these ladies such hopes of happiness and such pleasure, as the farmer receives from the spring, when the plenty of the year begins, and the prospect of the harvest fills him with delight.