But so rooted was our habitual impression of the part from seeing it caricatured in the representation, that it was only from a careful perusal of the play itself that we saw our error.  The stage is not in general the best place to study our author’s characters in.  It is too often filled with traditional common-place conceptions of the part, handed down from sire to son, and suited to the taste of the great vulgar and the small.—­’’Tis an unweeded garden:  things rank and gross do merely gender in it!’ If a man of genius comes once in an age to clear away the rubbish, to make it fruitful and wholesome, they cry, “Tis a bad school:  it may be like nature, it may be like Shakespeare, but it is not like us.”  Admirable critics!

THE WINTER’S TALE

We wonder that Mr. Pope should have entertained doubts of the genuineness of this play.  He was, we suppose, shocked (as a certain critic suggests) at the Chorus, Time, leaping over sixteen years with his crutch between the third and fourth act, and at Antigonus’s landing with the infant Perdita on the seacoast of Bohemia.  These slips or blemishes, however, do not prove it not to be Shakespeare’s; for he was as likely to fall into them as anybody; but we do not know anybody but himself who could produce the beauties.  The stuff of which the tragic passion is composed, the romantic sweetness, the comic humour, are evidently his.  Even the crabbed and tortuous style of the speeches of Leontes, reasoning on his own jealousy, beset with doubts and fears, and entangled more and more in the thorny labyrinth, bears every mark of Shakespeare’s peculiar manner of conveying the painful struggle of different thoughts and feelings, labouring for utterance, and almost strangled in me birth.  For instance: 

     Ha’ not you seen, Camillo? 
     (But that’s past doubt; you have, or your eye-glass
     Is thicker than a cuckold’s horn) or heard,
     (For to a vision so apparent, rumour
     Cannot be mute) or thought (for cogitation
     Resides not within man that does not think)
     My wife is slippery?  If thou wilt, confess,
     Or else be impudently negative,
     To have nor eyes, nor ears, nor thought.—­

Here Leontes is confounded with his passion, and does not know which way to turn himself, to give words to the anguish, rage, and apprehension which tug at his breast.  It is only as he is worked up into a clearer conviction of his wrongs by insisting on the grounds of his unjust suspicions to Camillo, who irritates him by his opposition, that he bursts out into the following vehement strain of bitter indignation:  yet even here his passion staggers, and is as it were oppressed with its own intensity.