Page:William Hazlitt - Characters of Shakespear's Plays (1817).djvu/355

Rh To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside In thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice; To be imprison'd in the viewless winds, And blown with restless violence round about The pendant world; or to be worse than worst Of those, that lawless and incertain thoughts Imagine howling!—'tis too horrible! The weariest and most loathed worldly life, That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment Can lay on nature, is a paradise To what we fear of death. Isabella. Alas! alas! Claudio. Sweet sister, let me live: What sin you do to save a brother's life. Nature dispenses with the deed so far, That it becomes a virtue."

What adds to the dramatic beauty of this scene and the effect of Claudio's passionate attachment to life is, that it immediately follows the Duke's lecture to him, in the character of the Friar, recommending an absolute indifference to it.

—"Reason thus with life,— If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing, That none but fools would keep: a breath thou art, Servile to all the skyey influences That do this habitation, where thou keep'st, Hourly afflict: merely, thou art death's fool; For him thou labour'st by thy flight to shun, And yet run'st toward him still: thou art not noble; For all the accommodations, that thou bear'st, Are nurs'd by baseness: thou art by no means valiant; For thou dost fear the soft and tender fork