I must have leave to say that the coincidence
of these two in the scheme of a single play is a thing hardly bearable by
men who object to too strong a savour of those too truly "Eternal
Cesspools" over which the first of living humourists holds as it were for
ever an everlasting nose--or rather, in one sense, does not hold but
expand it for the fuller inhalation of their too congenial fumes with an
apparent relish which will always seem the most deplorable to those who
the most gratefully and reasonably admire that high heroic genius, for
love of which the wiser sort of men must finally forgive all the noisy
aberrations of his misanthropy and philobulgary, anti-Gallican and
Russolatrous insanities of perverse and morbid eloquence.
The three detached or misclassified plays of Shakespeare in which alone a
reverent and reasonable critic might perhaps find something rationally
and really exceptionable have also this far other quality in common, that
in them as in his topmost tragedies of the same period either the
exaltation of his eloquence touches the very highest point of expressible
poetry, or his power of speculation alternately sounds the gulfs and
scales the summits of all imaginable thought.
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