Part I

, Section 15: "Choose a day on which to represent the most sublime and affecting tragedy we have; appoint the most favourite actors; spare no cost upon the scenes and decorations; unite the greatest efforts of poetry, painting, and music; and when you have collected your audience, just at the moment when their minds are erect with expectation, let it be reported that a state criminal of high rank is on the point of being executed in the adjoining square; in a moment the emptiness of the theatre would demonstrate the comparative weakness of the imitative arts, and proclaim the triumph of the real sympathy."

_Masterless passion_. Cf. "Merchant of Venice," iv, 1, 51: "For affection, Mistress of passion, sways it to the mood," etc.

P. 260. _satisfaction to the thought_. "Othello," iii, 3, 97.

_Now night descending_. See p. 128.

_Throw him_. Collins's "Ode to Fear."

_Ingratitude_. Cf. "King Lear," i, 4, 281: "More hideous, when thou show'st thee in a child."

P. 261. _both at the first_. "Hamlet," iii, 2, 23.

P. 262. _And visions_. Hazlitt uses this quotation in his paper on "Wordsworth's Excursion" in the "Round Table" with the change of _poetic_ to _prophetic_. "This couplet occurs in a letter from Gray to Walpole ('Letters,' ed. Tovey I, 7-8). The lines are apparently a translation by Gray of Virgil, 'Æneid,' VI, 282-84." Waller-Glover, XII, 504.

P. 263. _Doctor Chalmers's Discourses_. Thomas Chalmers (1780-1847), a celebrated divine and preacher of Scotland, published in 1817 "A Series of Discourses on the Christian Revelation, Viewed in Connection with Modern Astronomy."

_bandit fierce_. Milton's "Comus," 426.

_our fell of hair_. "Macbeth," v, 5, 11.

_Macbeth ... for the sake of the music_. Some copies of the first edition misprint _Macheath_, the name of the leading character in Gay's "Beggar's Opera." In writing "On Commonplace Critics," in the "Round Table," Hazlitt represents the commonplace critic as questioning whether any one of Shakespeare's plays, "if brought out now for the first time, would succeed. He thinks that 'Macbeth' would be the most likely, from the music which has been introduced into it." The reference is to the music written for D'Avenant's version of the play, produced in 1672. According to Waller-Glover (I, 436), "this music, traditionally assigned to Matthew Locke, is now attributed to Purcell"; but Furness, in the Variorum edition of "Macbeth," accepts the conclusion of Chappell in Grove's "Dictionary of Music," "that Purcell could not have been the composer of a work which appeared when he was in his fourteenth year," especially as "the only reason that can be assigned why modern musicians should have doubted Locke's authorship is that a manuscript of it exists in the handwriting of Henry Purcell."

P. 264. _Between the acting_. "Julius Cæsar," ii, 1, 63.

P. 265. _Thoughts that voluntary move_. "Paradise Lost," III, 37.

_the words of Mercury_. Cf. "Love's Labour's Lost," v, 2, 940: "The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo."

_So from the ground_. "Faërie Queene," I, vi, 13.

P. 266. _the secret_ [hidden] _soul_. Milton's "L'Allegro."

P. 267. _the golden cadences_. "Love's Labour's Lost," iv, 2, 126.

_Sailing with supreme dominion_. Gray's "Progress of Poesy."

_sounding always_. See p. 207 and n.

_except poets_. Cf. "On the Prose Style of Poets" in the "Plain Speaker": "What is a little extraordinary, there is a want of _rhythmus_ and cadence in what they write without the help of metrical rules. Like persons who have been accustomed to sing to music, they are at a loss in the absence of the habitual accompaniment and guide to their judgment. Their style halts, totters, is loose, disjointed, and without expressive pauses or rapid movements. The measured cadence and regular _sing-song_ of rhyme or blank verse have destroyed, as it were, their natural ear for the mere characteristic harmony which ought to subsist between the sound and the sense. I should almost guess the Author of Waverley to be a writer of ambling verses from the desultory vacillation and want of firmness in the march of his style. There is neither _momentum_ nor elasticity in it; I mean as to the _score_, or effect upon the ear. He has improved since in his other works: to be sure, he has had practice enough. Poets either get into this incoherent, undetermined, shuffling style, made up of 'unpleasing flats and sharps,' of unaccountable starts and pauses, of doubtful odds and ends, flirted about like straws in a gust of wind; or, to avoid it and steady themselves, mount into a sustained and measured prose (like the translation of Ossian's Poems, or some parts of Shaftesbury's Characteristics) which is more odious still, and as bad as being at sea in a calm." Hazlitt's views on this question are peculiar, though his examples are well chosen. The more common opinion is that voiced by Coleridge in his remarks "On Style": "It is, indeed, worthy of remark that all our great poets have been good prose writers, as Chaucer, Spenser, Milton; and this probably arose from their just sense of metre. For a true poet will never confound verse and prose; whereas it is almost characteristic of indifferent prose writers that they should be constantly slipping into scraps of metre." Works, IV, 342.

P. 268. _Addison's Campaign_ (1705), written in honor of Marlborough's victory at Blenheim, was described as "that gazette in rhyme" by Joseph Warton (1722-1800) in his "Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope," I, 29.

_Chaucer_. Cf. A. W. Pollard's "Chaucer," p. 35: "To Boccaccio's 'Teseide' and 'Filostrato,' he was indebted for something more than the groundwork of two of his most important poems; and he was also acquainted with three of his works in Latin prose. If, as is somewhat hardily maintained, he also knew the _Decamerone_, and took from it, in however improved a fashion, the idea of his Canterbury Pilgrimage and the plots of any or all of the four tales (besides that of Grisilde) to which resemblances have been traced in his own work, his obligations to Boccaccio become immense. Yet he never mentions his name, and it has been contended that he was himself unaware of the authorship of the poems and treatises to which he was so greatly indebted."

_Dryden_. His translations from Boccaccio are "Sigismonda and Guiscardo," "Theodore and Honoria," "Cymon and Iphigenia."

P. 269. _married to immortal verse_. "L'Allegro."

_John Bunyan_ (1628-1688), author of "Pilgrim's Progress" (1678).

_Daniel Defoe_ (c. 1659-1731), journalist and novelist. His masterpiece, "Robinson Crusoe," appeared in 1719.

_dipped in dews_. Cf. T. Heywood's "Ben Jonson, though his learned pen Was dipt in Castaly, is still but Ben."

_Philoctetes_. The story of the Greek hero who, on the voyage to the siege of Troy, was abandoned on an uninhabited island, is the subject of a play by Sophocles.

_As I walked about_. "Robinson Crusoe,"