If Shakespeare be allowed, as I think he must, to have made his characters distinct, it will easily be inferred, that he understood the nature of the passions:  because it has been proved already, that confused passions make distinguishable characters:  yet I cannot deny that he has his failings; but they are not so much in the passions themselves, as in his manner of expression:  he often obscures his meaning by his words, and sometimes makes it unintelligible.  I will not say of so great a poet, that he distinguished not the blown puffy stile, from true sublimity; but I may venture to maintain, that the fury of his fancy often transported him beyond the bounds of judgment, either in coining of new words and phrases, or racking words which were in use, into the violence of a catachresis.  It is not that I would explode the use of metaphors from passion, for Longinus thinks them necessary to raise it:  but to use them at every word, to say nothing without a metaphor, a simile, an image, or description; is, I doubt, to smell a little too strongly of the buskin.  I must be forced to give an example of expressing passion figuratively; but that I may do it with respect to Shakespeare, it shall not be taken from any thing of his:  it is an exclamation against Fortune, quoted in his Hamlet, but written by some other poet: 

  Out, out, thou strumpet Fortune! all you gods,
  In general synod, take away her power;
  Break all the spokes and felleys from her wheel,
  And bowl the round nave down the hill of heav’n,
  As low as to the fiends.

And immediately after, speaking of Hecuba, when Priam was killed before her eyes: 

  But who, ah woe! had seen the mobled queen
  Run barefoot up and down, threatening the flame
  With bisson rheum; a clout about that head,
  Where late the diadem stood; and, for a rob
  About her lank and all o’er-teemed loins,
  A blanket in th’ alarm of fear caught up. 
  Who this had seen, with tongue in venom steep’d
  ’Gainst fortune’s state would treason have pronounc’d;
  But if the gods themselves did see her then,
  When she saw Pyrrhus make malicious sport
  In mincing with his sword her husband’s limbs,
  The instant burst of clamour that she made
  (Unless things mortal move them not at all)
  Would have made milch the burning eyes of heaven,
  And passion in the gods.

What a pudder is here kept in raising the expression of trifling thoughts! would not a man have thought that the poet had been bound prentice to a wheel-wright, for his first rant? and had followed a rag-man, for the clout and blanket, in the second?  Fortune is painted on a wheel, and therefore the writer, in a rage, will have poetical justice done upon every member of that engine:  after this execution, he bowls the nave down-hill, from heaven, to the fiends:  (an unreasonable long mark, a man would think;) ’tis well there are no solid orbs to stop it in the way,