that he adopted them reluctantly in compliance
with the popular bent, and as needful to success. In his youth he
doubtless used them in good faith, and even sought for them as traits
of excellence; for he himself shared to the fullest extent in the
redundancy of mental life which distinguished the age, and which
naturally loves to sport itself in such quirks of thought and speech.
But it is manifest that he was not long in growing to distaste them,
notwithstanding that he still continued occasionally to practise them.
For, even in _The Merchant of Venice_, which I reckon among the last
in his earlier or the first in his middle style, we find him censuring
the thing while indulging it:

"O, dear discretion, how his words are suited!
The fool hath planted in his memory
An army of good words; and I do know
A many fools, that stand in better place,
Garnish'd like him, that for a tricksy word
Defy the matter."

In the case here censured, however, the thing, though a vice in
itself, is no offence to good taste, and may even be justly noted as a
stroke of dramatic virtue, because it is rightly characteristic of the
person using it: which only makes the reproof the more pointed as
aimed at the habit, then but too common in the high places of
learning, of so twisting language into puns and conceits, that one
could hardly come at the sense. But I can admit no such plea, when, in
_King Richard the Second_, the dying Gaunt goes to punning on his
name:

"Old Gaunt indeed; and gaunt in being old:
Within me grief hath kept a tedious fast;
And who abstains from meat, that is not gaunt?
For sleeping England long time have I watch'd;
Watching breeds leanness, leanness is all gaunt:
The pleasure that some fathers feed upon
Is my strict fast,--I mean my children's looks;
And therein fasting, hast thou made me gaunt:
Gaunt am I for the grave, gaunt as a grave,
Whose hollow womb inherits nought but bones."

This, notwithstanding it is defended by so sound a critic as Schlegel,
seems to me a decided blot; I cannot accept it as right either in
itself or on the score of dramatic fitness. Many like instances occur
in _Romeo and Juliet, King John_, and other plays of that period;
instances which I cannot help regarding not only as breaches of good
taste in the speakers, but as plain faults of style in the Poet
himself: the blame of them indeed properly rests with him, not w