age, which is, perhaps, the most striking that poetry
can produce, has been adopted by Dryden, in his Conquest of Mexico.

All things are hush'd as Nature's self lay dead,
The mountains seem to nod their drowsy head:
The little birds in dreams their songs repeat,
And sleeping flowers beneath the night dews sweat.
Even lust and envy sleep!

These lines, though so well known, I have transcribed, that the contrast
between them and this passage of Shakespeare may be more accurately
observed.

Night is described by two great poets, but one describes a night of
quiet, the other of perturbation. In the night of Dryden, all the
disturbers of the world are laid asleep; in that of Shakespeare, nothing
but sorcery, lust, and murder, is awake. He that reads Dryden, finds
himself lulled with serenity, and disposed to solitude and
contemplation. He that peruses Shakespeare, looks round alarmed, and
starts to find himself alone. One is the night of a lover; the other,
that of a murderer.

(b)--Wither'd murder,
--thus with his stealthy pace,
With Tarquin's ravishing _sides_ tow'rds his design,
Moves like a ghost.--

This was the reading of this passage in all the editions before that of
Mr. Pope, who for _sides_, inserted in the text _strides_, which Mr.
Theobald has tacitly copied from him, though a more proper alteration
might, perhaps, have been made. A _ravishing stride_ is an action of
violence, impetuosity, and tumult, like that of a savage rushing on his
prey; whereas the poet is here attempting to exhibit an image of secrecy
and caution, of anxious circumspection and guilty timidity, the
_stealthy pace_ of a _ravisher_ creeping into the chamber of a virgin,
and of an assassin approaching the bed of him whom he proposes to
murder, without awaking him; these he describes as _moving like ghosts_,
whose progression is so different from _strides_, that it has been in
all ages represented to be, as Milton expresses it,

Smooth sliding without step.

This hemistich will afford the true reading of this place, which is, I
think, to be corrected thus:

--and wither'd murder,
--thus with his stealthy pace,
With Tarquin ravishing, _slides_ tow'rds his design,
Moves like a ghost.

Tarquin is, in this place, the general name of a ravisher, and the sense
is: Now is the time in which every one is asleep, but those who are
employed in wickedness, the witch who is sacrificing to Hecate, and the
ravish