What had a grammatical and logical consistency for the ear, ­ what could be put together and represented to the eye ­ these poets took from the ear and eye, unchecked by any intuition of an inward impossibility; ­ just as a man might put together a quarter of an orange, a quarter of an apple, and the like of a lemon and a pomegranate, and make it look like one round diverse-coloured fruit. But nature, which works from within by evolution and assimilation according to a law, cannot do so, nor could Shakspeare; for he too worked in the spirit of nature, by evolving the germ from within by the imaginative power according to an idea. For as the power of seeing is to light, so is an idea in mind to a law in nature. They are correlatives, which suppose each other.

The plays of Beaumont and Fletcher are mere aggregations without unity; in the Shakspearian drama there is a vitality which grows and evolves itself from within, ­ a key note which guides and controls the harmonies throughout. What is

Lear

? ­ It is storm and tempest ­ the thunder at first grumbling in the far horizon, then gathering around us, and at length bursting in fury over our heads, ­ succeeded by a breaking of the clouds for a while, a last flash of lightning, the closing in of night, and the single hope of darkness! And

Romeo and Juliet

? ­ It is a spring day, gusty and beautiful in the morn, and closing like an April evening with the song of the nightingale; ­ whilst

Macbeth

is deep and earthy, ­ composed to the subterranean music of a troubled conscience, which converts every thing into the wild and fearful!

Doubtless from mere observation, or from the occasional similarity of the writer's own character, more or less in Beaumont and Fletcher, and other such writers will happen to be in correspondence with nature, and still more in apparent compatibility with it. But yet the false source is always discoverable, first by the gross contradictions to nature in so many other parts, and secondly, by the want of the impression which Shakspeare makes, that the thing said not only might have been said, but that nothing else could be substituted, so as to excite the same sense of its exquisite propriety. I have always thought the conduct and expressions of Othello and Iago in the last scene, when Iago is brought in prisoner, a wonderful instance of Shakspeare's consummate judgment:­

Oth. I look down towards his feet; ­ but that's a fable.
If that thou be'st a devil, I cannot kill thee.
Iago. I bleed, Sir; but not kill'd.
Oth. I am not sorry neither.