P. 84. _a great critic_, A. W. Schlegel. The passage alluded to by Hazlitt appears in Coleridge's Works (IV, 60-61) in what is little more than a free translation: "Read 'Romeo and Juliet';--all is youth and spring;--youth with its follies, its virtues, its precipitancies;--spring with its odors, its flowers, and its transiency; it is one and the same feeling that commences, goes through, and ends the play. The old men, the Capulets and the Montagues, are not common old men; they have an eagerness, a heartiness, a vehemence, the effect of spring; with Romeo, his change of passion, his sudden marriage, and his rash death, are all the effects of youth;--whilst in Juliet love has all that is tender and melancholy in the nightingale, all that is voluptuous in the rose, with whatever is sweet in the freshness of the spring; but it ends with a long deep sigh like the last breeze of the Italian evening." P. 85. _fancies wan_. Cf. "Lycidas," "cowslips wan." MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM These extracts are the second and last paragraphs of the essay. P. 85. _Lord, what fools_. iii, 2, 115. P. 86. _human mortals_. ii, 1, 101. _gorgons and hydras_. "Paradise Lost," II, 628. _a celebrated person_, Sir Humphry Davy; see p. 342. Cf. Coleridge (Works, IV, 66): "Shakespeare was not only a great poet, but a great philosopher." P. 87. _Poetry and the stage_. Cf. Lamb, "On the Tragedies of Shakespeare" (ed. Lucas, I, 110): "Spirits and fairies cannot be represented, they cannot even be painted,--they can only be believed. But the elaborate and anxious provision of scenery, which the luxury of the age demands, in these cases works a quite contrary effect to what is intended. That which in comedy, or plays of familiar life, adds so much to the life of the imitation, in plays which appeal to the higher faculties, positively destroys the illusion which it is introduced to aid." HENRY IV