fact just what might be expected from a
thoroughly modest, teachable, receptive, and at the same time most
living, active, and aspiring mind,--a mind full indeed of native
boldness, but yet restrained by judgment and good sense from the
crudeness and temerity of self-will and eccentric impulse, and not
trusting to its own strength till it had better reasons for doing so
than the promptings of vanity and egotism.

* * * * *

It is to this process of imitation that the Poet's faults of style are
to be mainly ascribed; though in the end it was no doubt in a great
measure the source of his excellences also. For, taking his works in
the order of their production, we can perceive very clearly that his
faults of style kept disappearing as he became more and more himself.
He advanced in the path of improvement by slow tentative methods, and
was evidently careful not to deviate from what was before him till he
saw unmistakably how he could do better. As he was thus "most severe
in fashion and collection of himself"; so he worked in just the true
way for disciplining and regulating his genius into power; and so in
due time he had a good right to be "as clear and confident as Jove."

Shakespeare's faults of style, especially in his earlier plays, are
neither few nor small. Among these are to be reckoned, of course, his
frequent quibbles and plays upon words, his verbal conceits and
affectations, his equivoques and clinches. Many of these are palpable
sins against manliness; not a few of them are decidedly puerile; the
results of an epidemic of trifling and of fanciful prettiness. Some
critics, it is true, have strained a point, if not several points, in
defence of them; but it seems to me that a fair-minded criticism has
no way but to set them down as plain blemishes and disfigurements. And
our right, nay, our duty to call them such is fully approved in that
the Poet himself seasonably outgrew and forsook them; a comparison of
his earlier and later plays thus showing that his manlier taste
discarded them. They were however nowise characteristic of him: they
were the fashion of the day, and were common to all the dramatic
writers of the time. Nor were they by any means confined to the walks
of the Drama: many men of the highest character and position both in
Church and State were more or less infected with them.

It is not likely indeed that Shakespeare at first regarded these
things as faults, or