Page:The Plays of William Shakspeare (1778).djvu/43

Rh with learning; but Othello is the vigorous and vivacious offspring of obervation impregnated by genius. Cato affords a plendid exhibition of artificial and fictitious manners, and delivers jut and noble entiments, in diction eay, elevated, and harmonious, but its hopes and fears communicate no vibration to the heart; the compoition refers us only to the writer; we pronounce the name of Cato, but we think on Addion.

The work of a correct and regular writer is a garden accurately formed and diligently planted, varied with hades, and cented with flowers; the compoition of Shakepeare is a foret, in which oaks extend their branches, and pines tower in the air, interpered ometimes with weeds and brambles, and ometimes giving helter to myrtles and to roes; filling the eye with awful pomp, and gratifying the mind with endles diverity. Other poets diplay cabinets of precious rarities, minutely finihed, wrought into hape, and polihed into brightnes. Shakepeare opens a mine which contains gold and diamonds in unexhautible plenty, though clouded by incrutations, debaed by impurities, and mingled with a mas of meaner minerals.

It has been much diputed, whether Shakepeare owed his excellence to his own native force, or whether he had the common helps of cholatick education, the precepts of critical cience, and the example of ancient authors. There