We are bound to deny with firmness this assumption: we refuse to admit the existence of any such dualism and contradiction, because the distinction between characters and actions, between style and dialogue and style and work, is arbitrary, scholastic and rhetorical. There is in Shakespeare one poetical stream, and it is impossible to set its waters against one another--characters against actions, and the like. So true is this, that save in cold blood, one does not notice his so-called contradictions, omissions and improbabilities, that is to say, when we leave the poetical condition of the spirit and begin to examine what we have read, as though it were the report of an occurrence. Nor is the imputation cast upon the speech of Shakespeare's characters, which is perfectly consonant with the nature of the poems, admissible. Hence from the lips of Macbeth and of Lady Macbeth, of Othello and of Lear, came true and proper lyrics. These are not interruptions and dissonances in the play, but motions and upliftings of the play itself; they are not the superposition of one life upon another, but the outpouring of that life, which is continued in the central motive. These witticisms, conceits and misunderstandings in _Romeo and Juliet,_ which have so often been blamed, are to be explained, at least in great measure, in a natural way, as the character of the play, as the comedy, which precedes and imparts its colour to the tragedy, and is brilliant with the fashionable and gallant speech of the day.