_Of this tragedy, many particular passages deserve regard, and the contention and reconcilement of Brutus and Cassius is universally celebrated. But I have never been strongly agitated in perusing it, and think it somewhat cold and unaffecting, etc._ Was "Hamlet" a low comedy part, in the days when all England bowed at the feet of an unkempt and mannerless old man, awed by the brilliancy of his literary judgment? And did Hamlet's "pretended madness" cause "much mirth" to the age, or only to {028}Samuel Johnson? People now-a-days do not sit and giggle over "the pretended madness of Hamlet." But, waiving these questions, let him turn to the "Rambler," * of this excellent lexicographer, and read him (patiently, if he can), citing the magnificent lines--= `````Come thick night ```And pall thee in the dun nest smoke of hell; ```That my keen knife see not the wound it makes, ```Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark ```To cry "_hold, hold!"_= as an example of "poetry debased by mean expressions;" because "dun" is a "low" expression," seldom heard but in the stable;" "knife" an instrument used by butchers and cooks in the meanest employment; and asking "who, without some relaxation of his gravity, can hear of the avengers of guilt _peeping_ through the blanket of the dark!" * No. 168. Let the reader look on a little further, and find this fossil-scanning machine telling off the spondees and dactyls in the dramas (to ascertain if the cæsura was exactly in the middle) on his fingers and thumbs, and counting the unities up to three, to see if he could approve of what the ages after him were to worship! if, haply, this Shakespeare (although he _might_ have devised a scheme to kill Laertes with the bowl and Hamlet with the dagger, or _might_ have thrown a little more fire into the quarrel with Brutus and Cassius) could be admitted to sit at the feet of Addison, with his sleepy and dreary "Campaign;" or Pope, with his metrical proverbs about "Man;" or even the aforesaid Samuel Johnson himself, with his rhymed dic{029}tionaries about the "vanity of human wishes," and so on. Let him find the old lexicographer admitting, in his gracious condescension, that "The Tempest" "is sufficiently regular;" of "Measure for Measure" that "the unities are sufficiently preserved;" that the "Midsummer Night's Dream" was "well written;" that the style of the "Merchant of Venice" was "easy:" but that in "As you Like It" "an opportunity of exhibiting a moral lesson" is unhappily lost. The "Winter's Tale" is "entertaining;" in "King John" he finds "a pleasing interchange of incidents and characters," remarking that "the lady's grief is very affecting." Of "Troilus and Cressida" the old formalist says, that it "is one of the most correctly written of Shakespeare's plays;" of "Coriolanus," that it "is one of the most amusing." But, he says, that "Antony and Cleopatra" is "low" and "without any art of