As he at last extends pardon to all the guilty, we do not see how his original purpose of restoring the strictness of the laws by committing the execution of them to other hands, has been in any wise accomplished. The poet might have had this irony in view—that of the numberless slanders of the Duke, told him by the petulant Lucio, without knowing the person to whom he spoke, what regarded his singularities and whims was not wholly without foundation. ‘It is deserving of remark, that Shakespear, amidst the rancour of religious parties, takes a delight in representing the condition of a monk, and always represents his influence as beneficial. We find in him none of the black and knavish monks, which an enthusiasm for the Protestant Religion, rather than poetical inspiration, has suggested to some of our modern poets. Shakespear merely gives his monks an inclination to busy themselves in the affairs of others, after renouncing the world for themselves; with respect, however, to privy frauds, he does not represent them as very conscientious. Such are the parts acted by the Monk in Romeo and Juliet, and another in Much ado about Nothing, and even by the Duke, whom, contrary to the well known proverb, “the cowl seems really to make a monk.”’ Vol. ii. p. 169. This is, we confess, a very poor criticism on a very fine play; but we are not in the humour (even if we could) to write a better. A very obvious beauty, which has escaped the critic, is the admirable description of life, as poetical as it is metaphysical, beginning, ‘If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing,’ &c. to the truth and justice of which Claudio assents, contrasted almost immediately afterwards with his fine description of death as the worst of ills: ‘To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot; This sensible warm motion to become A kneaded clod, and the delighted spirit To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside In thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice. ——’Tis too horrible! The weariest and most loathed worldly life That age, ache, penury, imprisonment, Can lay on nature, is a paradise To what we fear of death.’—