ther remediable
defects which are far, very far, from idealizing, transfiguring her! If
the time devoted to the piano, with the supposed poor result, had been
devoted to a careful cultivation of her voice, her power to charm (that
being the end proposed) would be much more increased than by any or all
of her other accomplishments.

It is easy to infer what Shakespeare's opinions were on many subjects,
although his Plays are regarded by some critics as peculiarly
impersonal; but they are charged with his personality, and shadow forth,
not dimly, his views in regard to many things. The evidence is abundant
that the voice was to him very significant, apart from his estimate of
its importance, as a professional actor, and that he was most
susceptible to its charms and to its defects. It is her voice which the
grief-stricken Lear is made to speak of, when he bends over the dead
Cordelia: 'Her voice,' he says, 'was ever soft, gentle, and low'; and to
this he adds, 'an excellent thing in woman'; Shakespeare, no doubt,
meaning that he had in his mind, at the time, the cruel voices,
expressive of their hard and wicked hearts, of Regan and Goneril. After
the death of Antony, Cleopatra, in her rapturous praise of him, says,---

His voice was propertied
As all the tuned spheres, and that to friends;
But when he meant to quail and shake the orb,
It was as rattling thunder.

Hamlet's advice to the players we may take as an expression of
Shakespeare's own standard of vocal delivery, and as his protest
against a stilted and ranting declamation, which, no doubt,
characterized many of the actors of his day.

There is evidence in the Plays that, in the process of composition, he
must either have heard imaginatively what he was writing, or have
actually voiced his language as he went along. He did not write for the
eye, but for the ear. And the high vocal capabilities of his language
may be somewhat attributable to his hearing of what he wrote. Must he
not have heard the effect of monosyllabic words, uttered with the tremor
and semi-tone of old age, when he wrote King Lear's speeches?--'You see
me here, you gods, a poor old man, as full of grief as age,' etc., and
'When we are born, we cry that we are come to this great stage of
fools,' etc. And must he not have heard the effect of polysyllabic
words as expressive of Macbeth's sense of the vastness of his guilt,
when he wrote, 'this my hand will rather