with metrical accompaniments to match; and then he will pass in the same speech from this poetical magnificence to the plain downright scorn of
This fellow had a Volscian to his mother.[1]
He will write, using the simplest words and most familiar metre,
Fear no more the heat of the sun,
Nor the furious winter's rages,
producing, it appears, on some people the effect of 'drivel'—certainly producing on others the effect of the most perfect and poignant poetry of ordinary life. And then, within a page or two, he will sketch a picture of war in a line and a half, with a couple of images of sound and sight that could not be beaten in effect by a paragraph, or another page:
That when they hear the Roman horses neigh,
Behold their quartered fires—
where the absence of superfluity, and the presence of concentration, are equally remarkable.[2] For my part, if I had any doubt about Shakespeare having a hand in Pericles, one line would settle it—
A terrible childbed hast thou had, my dear.[3]
For even Middleton or Webster, the two who have come nearest to Shakespearian phraseology, could hardly have achieved this curious union of simplicity and the Grand Style; while Cyril Tourneur, who has been thought by some to have the touch, certainly could not have achieved it.
Nor is it less interesting to examine the passages which—not of the greatest as wholes; not containing any of the actual 'jewels five words long' which are so plentiful; not exempt, it may be, from the less grand marks of the form
