to wish it? What is said by the speakers
is exactly what they might be expected to think, to feel, and to express
with less incisive power and less impressive accuracy of ardent epigram
or of strenuous appeal.[1]

[Footnote 1: It is, to say the least, singular to find in the most
famous scene of a play, so often reprinted and re-edited a word which
certainly requires explanation passed over without remark from any one
of the successive editors. When Gratiana, threatened by the daggers of
her sons, exclaims:

Are you so barbarous to set iron nipples
Upon the breast that gave you suck?

Vindice retorts, in reply to her appeal:

That breast
Is turned to quarled poison.

This last epithet is surely unusual enough to call for some attempt at
interpretation. But none whatever has hitherto been offered. In the
seventh line following from this one there is another textual
difficulty. The edition now before me, Eld's of 1608, reads literally
thus:

_Vind._ Ah ist possible, _Thou onely_, you powers on hie,
That women should dissemble when they die.

Lamb was content to read,

Ah, is it possible, you powers on high,

and so forth. Perhaps the two obviously corrupt words in italics may
contain a clew to the right reading, and this may be it:

Ah!
Is't possible, you heavenly powers on high,
That women should dissemble when they die?

Or may not this be yet another instance of the Jew-Puritan abhorrence of
the word God as an obscene or blasphemous term when uttered outside the
synagogue or the conventicle? If so, we might read--and believe that the
poet wrote--

Is't possible, thou only God on high,

and assume that the licenser struck out the indecent monosyllable and
left the mutilated text for actors and printers to patch or pad at their
discretion.]

There are among poets, as there are among prose writers, some whose
peculiar power finds vent only in a broad and rushing stream of speech
or song, triumphant by the general force and fulness of its volume, in
which we no more think of looking for single lines or phrases that may
be detached from the context and quoted for their separate effect than
of selecting for peculiar admiration some special wave or individual
ripple from the multitudinous magnificence of the torrent or the tide.
There are others whose power is shown mainly in single strokes or
flashes as of lightning or of swords. There are f