the poor itch of your opinion,
Make yourselves scabs?"

"So shall my lungs
Coin words till their decay against those measles,
Which we disdain should tetter us, yet sought
The very way to catch them."

Either from overboldness in the metaphors, or from some unaptness in
the material of them, I have to confess that my mind rather rebels
against these stretches of poetical prerogative. Still more so,
perhaps, in the well-known passage of _King Henry the Fifth_, iv. 3;
though I am not sure but, in this case, the thing rightly belongs to
the speaker's character:

"And those that leave their valiant bones in France,
Dying like men, though buried in your dunghills,
They shall be fam'd; for there the Sun shall greet them,
And draw their honours reeking up to heaven;
Leaving their earthly parts to choke your clime,
The smell whereof shall breed a plague in France.
Mark, then, abounding valour in our English;
That, being dead, like to the bullet's grazing,
Break out into a second course of mischief,
Killing in relapse of mortality."

But, whatever be the right mark to set upon these and some other
instances, I find but few occasions of such revolt; and my only wonder
is, how any mere human genius could be so gloriously audacious, and
yet be so seldom chargeable with passing the just bounds of poetical
privilege.

Metaphors are themselves the aptest and clearest mode of expressing
much in little. No other form of speech will convey so much thought in
so few words. They often compress into a few words what would else
require as many sentences. But even such condensations of meaning did
not--so it appears--always answer Shakespeare's purpose: he sometimes
does hardly more than _suggest_ metaphors, throwing off several of
them in quick succession. We have an odd instance of this in one of
Falstaff's speeches, Second Part of _King Henry the Fourth_, i. 2:
"Well, he may sleep in security; for he hath the horn of abundance,
and the lightness of his wife shines through it: and yet cannot he
see, though he have his own lantern to light him." Here we have a
thick-coming series of punning metaphors, all merely suggested. So
Brutus, when hunting after reasons for killing Caesar: "It is the
bright day that brings forth the adder." Here the metaphor suggested
is, that the sunshine of kingly power will develop a venomous serpent
in the hitherto nob