Page:The Plays of William Shakspeare (1778).djvu/25

Rh labour, what no labour can improve. In tragedy he is always truggling after ome occaion to be comick, but in comedy he eems to repoe, or to luxuriate, as in a mode of thinking congenial to his nature. In his tragick cenes there is always omething wanting, but his comedy often urpaes expectation or deire. His comedy pleaes by the thoughts and the language, and his tragedy for the greater part by incident and action. His tragedy eems to be kill, his comedy to be intinct.

The force of his comick cenes has uffered little diminution from the changes made by a century and a half, in manners or in words. As his peronages act upon principles ariing from genuine paion, very little modified by particular forms, their pleaures and vexations are communicable to all times and to all places; they are natural and therefore durable; the adventitious peculiarities of peronal habits, are only uperficial dies, bright and pleaing for a little while, yet oon fading to a dim tinct, without any remains of former lutre; but the dicriminations of true paion are the colours of nature; they pervade the whole mas, and can only perih with the body that exhibits them. The accidental compoitions of heterogeneous modes are diolved by the chance which combined them; but the uniform implicity of primitive qualities neither admits increae, nor uffers decay. The and heaped by one flood is cattered by another, but the rock always continues in its place. The tream of time, which is continually wahing the dioluble fabricks of other poets, paes without injury by the adamant of Shakepeare. If