of their dress and the duty in which they are engaged.
Shakespeare's messengers, for instance, are for the most part mere
messengers, and yet not common, but poetical messengers: the message
which they have to bring is the soul which suggests to them their
language. Other voices, too, are merely raised to pour forth these as
melodious lamentations or rejoicings, or to dwell in reflection on
what has taken place; and in a serious drama without chorus this must
always be more or less the case, if we would not have it prosaic.

If Shakespeare deserves our admiration for his characters, he is
equally deserving of it for his exhibition of passion, taking this
word in its widest signification, as including every mental condition,
every tone, from indifference or familiar mirth to the wildest rage
and despair. He gives us the history of minds; he lays open to us, in
a single word, a whole series of their anterior states. His passions
do not stand at the same height, from first to last, as is the case
with so many tragic poets, who, in the language of Lessing, are
thorough masters of the legal style of love. He paints, with
inimitable veracity, the gradual advance from the first origin; "he
gives," as Lessing says, "a living picture of all the slight and
secret artifices by which a feeling steals into our souls, of all the
imperceptible advantages which it there gains, of all the stratagems
by which it makes every other passion subservient to itself, till it
becomes the sole tyrant of our desires and our aversions." Of all the
poets, perhaps, he alone has portrayed the mental diseases,
melancholy, delirium, lunacy, with such inexpressible and, in every
respect, definite truth, that the physician may enrich his
observations from them in the same manner as from real cases.

And yet Johnson has objected to Shakespeare that his pathos is not
always natural and free from affectation. There are, it is true,
passages, though comparatively speaking very few, where his poetry
exceeds the bounds of actual dialogue, where a too soaring
imagination, a too luxuriant wit, rendered a complete dramatic
forgetfulness of himself impossible. With this exception, the censure
originated in a fanciless way of thinking, to which everything appears
unnatural that does not consort with its own tame insipidity. Hence an
idea has been formed of simple and natural pathos, which consists in
exclamations destitute of imagery and nowise elevated above every