And mine a sad one.”
The pencil and the skill alone are wanting to multiply the Emblems for the Poetic Ideas which abound in Shakespeare’s dramas. His thoughts and their combinations are in general so clothed with life and with other elements of beauty, that materials for pictures exist in all parts of his writings. Our office, however, is not to exercise the inventive faculty, nor, even when the invention has been perfected for us by the poet’s fancy, to give it a visible form and to portray its outward graces. We have simply to gather up the scattered records of the past, and to show what correspondencies there really are between Shakespeare and the elder Emblem artists, and, when we can, to point out where to him they have been models, imitated and thus approved. Though, therefore, we might draw many a sketch, and finish many a picture from ideas to be supplied from this unexhausted fountain, we are mindful of the humbler task belonging to him who collects, and on his shelf of literary antiquities places, only what has the stamp of nearly three centuries upon them.
Boissard, 1596.
Section VIII.
MORAL AND ÆSTHETIC EMBLEMS.
REJOICING much if the end should crown the earlier portions of our work, we enter now on the last and most welcome section of this chapter,—on the Emblems which depict moral qualities and æsthetical properties,—the Emblems which concern the judgments and perceptions of the mind, and the conduct of the heart, the conscience, and the life.
Quæ ante pedes.