[P. 51.] Dr. Johnson is of opinion. “It may be observed that in many of his plays the latter part is evidently neglected. When he found himself near the end of his work, and in view of his reward, he shortened the labour to snatch the profit. He therefore remits his efforts where he should most vigorously exert them, and his catastrophe is improbably produced or imperfectly represented.” (Nichol Smith: “Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare,” p. 123.)
It is the peculiar excellence, etc. Cf. Coleridge’s Works, IV, 75-76: “In Shakespeare all the elements of womanhood are holy, and there is the sweet, yet dignified feeling of all that continuates society, a sense of ancestry and of sex, with a purity unassailable by sophistry, because it rests not in the analytic process, but in that sane equipoise of the faculties, during which the feelings are representative of all past experience,—not of the individual only, but of all those by whom she has been educated, and their predecessors even up to the first mother that lived. Shakespeare saw that the want of prominence which Pope notices for sarcasm, was the blessed beauty of the woman’s character, and knew that it arose not from any deficiency, but from the exquisite harmony of all the parts of the moral being constituting one living total of head and heart. He has drawn it indeed in all its distinctive energies of faith, patience, constancy, fortitude,—shown in all of them as following the heart, which gives its results by a nice tact and happy intuition, without the intervention of the discursive faculty, sees all things in and by the light of the affections, and errs, if it ever err, in the exaggerations of love alone.”
[P. 52.] Cibber, in speaking. See “Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber” (1740), I, iv.
My lord. i, 6, 112.
[P. 53.] What cheer. iii, 4, 41. The six quotations following are in the same scene.
[P. 54.] My dear lord. iii, 6, 14.
And when with wild wood-leaves. iv, 2, 389.
[P. 55.] With fairest flowers. iv, 2, 218.
Cytherea, how bravely. ii, 2, 14.
Me of my lawful pleasure. ii, 5, 9.