_Coriolanus._ If you have writ your annals true, ’tis there, That like an eagle in a dovecote, I Fluttered your Volscians in Corioli. Alone I did it. Boy! _Timon._ Come not to me again; but say to Athens, Timon hath made his everlasting mansion Upon the beachèd verge of the salt flood.... It occurs also once in _Antony and Cleopatra_, when Enobarbus is inspired to see Cleopatra in this dramatic light: The barge she sat in.... Shakespeare made fun of Marston, and Jonson made fun of Kyd. But in Marston’s play the words were expressive of nothing; and Jonson was criticizing the feeble and conceited language, not the emotion, not the “oratory.” Jonson is as oratorical himself, and the moments when his oratory succeeds are, I believe, the moments that conform to our formula. Notably the speech of Sylla’s ghost in the induction to _Catiline_, and the speech of Envy at the beginning of _The Poetaster_. These two figures are contemplating their own dramatic importance, and quite properly. But in the Senate speeches in _Catiline_, how tedious, how dusty! Here we are spectators not of a play of characters, but of a play of forensic, exactly as if we had been forced to attend the sitting itself. A speech in a play should never appear to be intended to move us as it might conceivably move other characters in the play, for it is essential that we should preserve our position of spectators, and observe always from the outside though with complete understanding. The scene in _Julius Cæsar_ is right because the object of our attention is not the speech of Antony (_Bedeutung_) but the effect of his speech upon the mob, and Antony’s intention, his preparation and consciousness of the effect. And in the rhetorical speeches from Shakespeare which have been cited, we have this necessary advantage of a new clue to the character, in noting the angle from which he views himself. But when a character _in_ a play makes a direct appeal to us, we are either the victims of our own sentiment, or we are in the presence of a vicious rhetoric.