he opinion here combated, even though he
might do that as well as any one else, unless he could do it better than
anybody else." See also p. 99.

CHARACTERS OF SHAKSPEARE'S PLAYS

CYMBELINE

P. 51. _Dr. Johnson is of opinion_. "It may be observed that in many of
his plays the latter part is evidently neglected. When he found himself
near the end of his work, and in view of his reward, he shortened the
labour to snatch the profit. He therefore remits his efforts where he
should most vigorously exert them, and his catastrophe is improbably
produced or imperfectly represented." (Nichol Smith: "Eighteenth Century
Essays on Shakespeare," p. 123.)

_It is the peculiar excellence_, etc. Cf. Coleridge's Works, IV, 75-76:
"In Shakespeare all the elements of womanhood are holy, and there is the
sweet, yet dignified feeling of all that _continuates_ society, a sense of
ancestry and of sex, with a purity unassailable by sophistry, because it
rests not in the analytic process, but in that sane equipoise of the
faculties, during which the feelings are representative of all past
experience,--not of the individual only, but of all those by whom she has
been educated, and their predecessors even up to the first mother that
lived. Shakespeare saw that the want of prominence which Pope notices for
sarcasm, was the blessed beauty of the woman's character, and knew that it
arose not from any deficiency, but from the exquisite harmony of all the
parts of the moral being constituting one living total of head and heart.
He has drawn it indeed in all its distinctive energies of faith, patience,
constancy, fortitude,--shown in all of them as following the heart, which
gives its results by a nice tact and happy intuition, without the
intervention of the discursive faculty, sees all things in and by the
light of the affections, and errs, if it ever err, in the exaggerations of
love alone."

P. 52. _Cibber, in speaking_. See "Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley
Cibber" (1740), I, iv.

_My lord_. i, 6, 112.

P. 53. _What cheer_. iii, 4, 41. The six quotations following are in the
same scene.

P. 54. _My dear lord_. iii, 6, 14.

_And when with wild wood-leaves_. iv, 2, 389.

P. 55. _With fairest flowers_. iv, 2, 218.

_Cytherea, how bravely_. ii, 2, 14.

_Me of my lawful pleasure_. ii, 5, 9.

P. 56. _whose love-suit_. iii, 4, 136.

_the ancient critic_. Aristophanes of Byzantium, who lived in the third
century before the Christian