(f) Once more, to say that Shakespeare makes all his serious characters talk alike,[24] and that he constantly speaks through the mouths of his dramatis personae without regard to their individual natures, would be to exaggerate absurdly; but it is true that in his earlier plays these faults are traceable in some degree, and even in Hamlet there are striking passages where dramatic appropriateness is sacrificed to some other object.  When Laertes speaks the lines beginning,

     For nature, crescent, does not grow alone
     In thews and bulk,

who can help feeling that Shakespeare is speaking rather than Laertes?  Or when the player-king discourses for more than twenty lines on the instability of human purpose, and when King Claudius afterwards insists to Laertes on the same subject at almost equal length, who does not see that Shakespeare, thinking but little of dramatic fitness, wishes in part simply to write poetry, and partly to impress on the audience thoughts which will help them to understand, not the player-king nor yet King Claudius, but Hamlet himself, who, on his side,—­and here quite in character—­has already enlarged on the same topic in the most famous of his soliloquies?

(g) Lastly, like nearly all the dramatists of his day and of times much earlier, Shakespeare was fond of ‘gnomic’ passages, and introduces them probably not more freely than his readers like, but more freely than, I suppose, a good play-wright now would care to do.  These passages, it may be observed, are frequently rhymed (e.g. Othello, I. iii. 201 ff., II. i. 149 ff.).  Sometimes they were printed in early editions with inverted commas round them, as are in the First Quarto Polonius’s ‘few precepts’ to Laertes.

If now we ask whence defects like these arose, we shall observe that some of them are shared by the majority of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, and abound in the dramas immediately preceding his time.  They are characteristics of an art still undeveloped, and, no doubt, were not perceived to be defects.  But though it is quite probable that in regard to one or two kinds of imperfection (such as the superabundance of ‘gnomic’ passages) Shakespeare himself erred thus ignorantly, it is very unlikely that in most cases he did so, unless in the first years of his career of authorship.  And certainly he never can have thought it artistic to leave inconsistencies, obscurities, or passages of bombast in his work.  Most of the defects in his writings must be due to indifference or want of care.

I do not say that all were so.  In regard, for example, to his occasional bombast and other errors of diction, it seems hardly doubtful that his perception was sometimes at fault, and that, though he used the English language like no one else, he had not that sureness of taste in words which has been shown by some much smaller writers.  And it seems not unlikely that here he suffered from his comparative