though it partakes of ’the liberty of wit’, is also subjected to ‘the law’ of the understanding.  For instance, even the drunken sailors, who are made reeling-ripe, share, in the disorder of their minds and bodies, in the tumult of the elements, and seem on shore to be as much at the mercy of chance as they were before at the mercy of the winds and waves.  These fellows with their sea-wit are the least to our taste of any part of the play:  but they are as like drunken sailors as they can be, and are an indirect foil to Caliban, whose figure acquires a classical dignity in the comparison.

The character of Caliban is generally thought (and justly so) to be one of the author’s masterpieces.  It is not indeed pleasant to see this character on the stage any more than it is to see the God Pan personated there.  But in itself it is one of the wildest and most abstracted of all Shakespeare’s characters, whose deformity whether of body or mind is redeemed by the power and truth of the imagination displayed in it.  It is the essence of grossness, but there is not a particle of vulgarity in it.  Shakespeare has described the brutal mind of Caliban in contact with the pure and original forms of nature; the character grows out of the soil where it is rooted uncontrolled, uncouth and wild, uncramped by any of the meannesses of custom.  It is ‘of the earth, earthy’.  It seems almost to have been dug out of the ground, with a soul instinctively superadded to it answering to its wants and origin.  Vulgarity is not natural coarseness, but conventional coarseness, learnt from others, contrary to, or without an entire conformity of natural power and disposition; as fashion is the commonplace affectation of what is elegant and refined without any feeling of the essence of it.  Schlegel, the admirable German critic on Shakespeare observes that Caliban is a poetical character, and ‘always speaks in blank verse’.  He first comes in thus: 

   Caliban.  As wicked dew as e’er my mother brush’d
     With raven’s feather from unwholesome fen,
     Drop on you both:  a south-west blow on ye,
     And blister you all o’er!

   Prospero.  For this, be sure, to-night thou shalt have cramps,
     Side-stitches that shall pen thy breath up; urchins
     Shall for that vast of night that they may work,
     All exercise on thee:  thou shalt be pinch’d
     As thick as honey-combs, each pinch more stinging
     Than bees that made ’em.

   Caliban.  I must eat my dinner. 
     This island’s mine by Sycorax my mother,
     Which thou tak’st from me.  When thou camest first,
     Thou strok’dst me, and mad’st much of me; would’st give me
     Water with berries in ’t; and teach me how
     To name the bigger light and how the less
     That burn by day and night; and then I lov’d thee,
     And show’d thee all the qualities o’ th’ isle,
     The fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place and fertile: