Page:William Hazlitt - Characters of Shakespear's Plays (1817).djvu/124

94 These passages may not seem very characteristic at first sight, though we think they are so. We will give two, that cannot be mistaken. Patroclus says to Achilles,

Troilus, addressing the God of Day on the approach of the morning that parts him from Cressida, says with much scorn,

If nobody but Shakespear could have written the former, nobody but Chaucer would have thought of the latter.—Chaucer was the most literal of poets, as Richardson was of prose-writers.