Sees the high seas come rolling from afar, &c.
My Indian potentate was well skilled in the sea for an inland prince, and well improved since the first act, when he sent his son to discover it. The image had not been amiss from another man, at another time: Sed nunc non erat his locus: he destroyed the concernment which the audience might otherwise have had for him; for they could not think the danger near, when he had the leisure to invent a simile.
If Shakespeare be allowed, as I think he must, to have made his characters distinct, it will easily be inferred, that he understood the nature of the passions: because it has been proved already, that confused passions make distinguishable characters: yet I cannot deny that he has his failings; but they are not so much in the passions themselves, as in his manner of expression: he often obscures his meaning by his words, and sometimes makes it unintelligible. I will not say of so great a poet, that he distinguished not the blown puffy stile, from true sublimity; but I may venture to maintain, that the fury of his fancy often transported him beyond the bounds of judgment, either in coining of new words and phrases, or racking words which were in use, into the violence of a catachresis. It is not that I would explode the use of metaphors from passion, for Longinus thinks them necessary to raise it: but to use them at every word, to say nothing without a metaphor, a simile, an image, or 262 description; is, I doubt, to smell a little too strongly of the buskin. I must be forced to give an example of expressing passion figuratively; but that I may do it with respect to Shakespeare, it shall not be taken from any thing of his: it is an exclamation against Fortune, quoted in his Hamlet, but written by some other poet:
Out, out, thou strumpet Fortune! all you gods,
In general synod, take away her power;
Break all the spokes and felleys from her wheel,
And bowl the round nave down the hill of heav'n,
As low as to the fiends.
And immediately after, speaking of Hecuba, when Priam was killed before her eyes:
But who, ah woe! had seen the mobled queen