Countess. I pray thee, Lady, have a better cheer:
If thou ingrossest all the griefs as thine,
Thou robb’st me of a moiety.
All’s well that ends well, act 3. sc. 3.
K. Henry. O my poor kingdom, sick with civil blows!
When that my care could not with-hold thy riots,
What wilt thou do when riot is thy care?
O, thou wilt be a wilderness again,
Peopled with wolves, thy old inhabitants.
Second part, Henry IV. act 4. sc. 11.
Cruda Amarilli, che col nome ancora
D’amar, ahi lasso, amaramente insegni.
Pastor Fido, act 1. sc. 2.
Antony, speaking of Julius Cæsar:
O world! thou wast the forest of this hart;
And this, indeed, O world, the heart of thee.
How like a deer, stricken by many princes,
Dost thou here lie!
Julius Cæsar, act 3. sc. 3.
Playing thus with the sound of words, which is still worse than a pun, is the meanest of all conceits. But Shakespear, when he descends to a play of words, is not always in the wrong; for it is done sometimes to denote a peculiar character; as is the following passage.
King Philip. What say’st thou, boy? look in the lady’s face.
Lewis. I do, my Lord, and in her eye I find
A wonder, or a wond’rous miracle;
The shadow of myself form’d in her eye;
Which being but the shadow of your son,
Becomes a sun, and makes your son a shadow.
I do protest, I never lov’d myself,
Till now infixed I beheld myself
Drawn in the flatt’ring table of her eye.
Faulconbridge. Drawn in the flatt’ring table of her eye!
Hang’d in the frowning wrinkle of her brow!
And quarter’d in her heart! he doth espy
Himself Love’s traitor: this is pity now,
That hang’d, and drawn, and quarter’d, there should be,
In such a love so vile a lout as he.
King John, act. 2. sc. 5.
A jingle of words is the lowest species of this low wit; which is scarce sufferable in any case, and least of all in an heroic poem. And yet Milton in some instances has descended to this puerility: