mperate and occasional as Shakespeare's: but the
graveyard meditations of Hamlet, perfect in dramatic tact and instinct,
seem cool and common and shallow in sentiment when set beside the
intensity of inspiration which animates the fitful and impetuous music
of such passages as these:

Here's an eye
Able to tempt a great man--to serve God;
A pretty hanging lip, that has forgot now to dissemble.
Methinks this mouth should make a swearer tremble,
A drunkard clasp his teeth, and not undo 'em
To suffer wet damnation to run through 'em.
Here's a cheek keeps her color let the wind go whistle;
Spout, rain, we fear thee not: be hot or cold,
All's one with us; and is not he absurd,
Whose fortunes are upon their faces set
That fear no other God but wind and wet?

_Hippolito._ Brother, y'ave spoke that right;
Is this the face that living shone so bright?

_Vindice._ The very same.
And now methinks I could e'en chide myself
For doting on her beauty, though her death
Shall be revenged after no common action.
Does the silk-worm expend her yellow labors
For thee? for thee does she undo herself?
Are lordships sold to maintain ladyships
For the poor benefit of a bewitching minute?[1]
Why does yon fellow falsify highways
And put his life between the judge's lips,
To refine such a thing, keeps horse and men
To beat their valors for her?
Surely we're all mad people, and they[2]
Whom we think are, are not: we mistake those:
'Tis we are mad in sense, they but in clothes.

_Hippolito_. 'Faith, and in clothes too we, give us our due.

_Vindice_. Does every proud and self-affecting dame
Camphire her face for this? and grieve her Maker
In sinful baths of milk--when many an infant starves,
For her superfluous outside,--all for this?

[Footnote 1: This is not, I take it, one of the poet's irregular
though not unmusical lines; the five short unemphatic syllables,
rapidly run together in one slurring note of scorn, being not more
than equivalent in metrical weight to three such as would take their
places if the verse were thus altered--and impaired:

For the poor price of one bewitching minute.]

[Footnote 2: Perhaps we might venture here to read--"and only they."
In the next line, "whom" for "who" is probably the poet's own license
or oversight.]

What follows is no whit less nobl