And even Shakspeare must be ranged in the same category. The most English of poets has not one laudatory phrase for ---- 'The seas Which God hath given for fence impregnable' to the poet's England. It is idle to say that Shakspeare was inland-bred--that he knew nothing, and could therefore have cared nothing about the matter--seeing that, insensible as he might have been to its beauties, he makes constant reference to the sea, and even in language implying that his familiarity with it was not inferior to that of any yachtsman who has ever sailed out of Cowes Harbour. He uses nautical terms frequently and appropriately. Romeo's rope-ladder is 'the high top-gallant of his joy;' King John, dying of poison, declares 'the tackle of his heart is cracked,' and 'all the shrouds wherewith his life should sail' wasted 'to a thread.' Polonius tells Laertes, 'the wind sits in the shoulder of your sail'--a technical expression, the singular propriety of which a naval critic has recently established; whilst some of the commentators on the passage in _King Lear_, descriptive of the prospect from Dover Cliffs, affirm that the comparison as to apparent size, of the ship to her cock-boat, and the cock-boat to a buoy, discover a perfect knowledge of the relative proportions of the objects named. In _Hamlet_, _Othello_, _The Tempest_, _The Merchant of Venice_, _The Comedy of Errors_, _Twelfth Night_, _Winter's Tale_, _Measure for Measure_, and _Pericles_, sea-storms are made accessory to the development of the plot, and sometimes described with a force and truthfulness which forbid the belief that the writer had never witnessed such scenes: however, like Horace, it is in the darkest colours that Shakspeare uniformly paints 'the multitudinous seas.' In the _Winter's Tale_, we read of-- ---- 'the fearful usage (Albeit ungentle) of the dreadful Neptune.'