Page:The Age of Shakespeare - Swinburne (1908).djvu/297

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280
THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE

Why does yon fellow falsify highways
And put his life between the judge's lips,
To refine such a thing, keeps horse and men
To beat their valors for her?
Surely we're all mad people, and they[1]
Whom we think are, are not: we mistake those:
'Tis we are mad in sense, they but in clothes.
Hippolito. 'Faith, and in clothes too we, give us our due.
Vindice. Does every proud and self-affecting dame
Camphire her face for this? and grieve her Maker
In sinful baths of milk—when many an infant starves,
For her superfluous outside,—all for this?

What follows is no whit less noble: but as much may be said of the whole part—and indeed of the whole play. Violent and extravagant as the mere action or circumstance may be or may appear, there is a trenchant straightforwardness of appeal in the simple and spontaneous magnificence of the language, a depth of insuppressible sincerity in the fervent and restless vibration of the thought, by which the hand and the brain and the heart of the workman are equally recognisable. But the crowning example of Cyril Tourneur's

    together in one slurring note of scorn, being not more than equivalent in metrical weight to three such as would take their places if the verse were thus altered—and impaired:    For the poor price of one bewitching minute.

  1. Perhaps we might venture here to read—'and only they.' In the next line, 'whom' for 'who' is probably the poet's own license or oversight.