“First, as you know, my house within the city Is richly furnished with plate and gold; Basins and ewers to lave her dainty hands; My hangings all of Tyrian tapestry; In ivory coffers I have stuff’d my crowns; In cypress chests my arras counterpoints, Costly apparel, tents, and canopies, Fine linen, Turkey cushions boss’d with pearl, Valance of Venice gold in needlework, Pewter and brass and all things that belong To house or housekeeping.” And Hamlet, when he contrasts his father and his uncle, act iii. sc. 4, lines 55–62, vol. viii. p. 111, what a force of artistic skill does he not display! It is indeed a poet’s description, but it has all the power and reality of a most finished picture. The very form and features are presented, as if some limner, a perfect master of his pencil, had portrayed and coloured them:— “See what a grace was seated on this brow; Hyperion’s curls, the front of Jove himself, An eye like Mars, to threaten and command; A station like the herald Mercury New lighted on a heaven-kissing hill; A combination and a form indeed, Where every god did seem to set his seal To give the world assurance of a man.” In the _Merchant of Venice_, too, act iii. sc. 2, lines 115–128, vol. ii. p. 328, when Bassanio opens the leaden casket and discovers the portrait of Portia, who but one endowed with a painter’s inspiration could speak of it as Shakespeare does!— “Fair Portia’s counterfeit! What demi-god Hath come so near creation? Move these eyes? Or whether, riding on the balls of mine, Seem they in motion? Here are sever’d lips, Parted with sugar breath: so sweet a bar Should sunder such sweet friends. Here in her hairs The painter plays the spider, and hath woven A golden mesh to entrap the hearts of men, Faster than gnats in cobwebs; but her eyes,— How could he see to do them? Having made one, Methinks it should have power to steal both his And leave itself unfurnish’d.” Such power of estimating artistic skill authorises the supposition that Shakespeare himself had made the painter’s art a subject of more than accidental study; else whence such expressions as those which in the _Antony_, act ii. sc. 2, lines 201–209, vol. ix. p. 38, are applied to Cleopatra?—