I am ready to grant that Shakespeare sometimes allows his
characters to spend time, that might be better employed, in carving some
cherry-stone of a quibble;[130] that he is sometimes tempted away from
the natural by the quaint; that he sometimes forces a partial, even a
verbal, analogy between the abstract thought and the sensual image into
an absolute identity, giving us a kind of serious pun. In a pun our
pleasure arises from a gap in the logical nexus too wide for the reason,
but which the ear can bridge in an instant. "Is that your own hare, or a
wig?" The fancy is yet more tickled where logic is treated with a mock
ceremonial of respect.
"His head was turned, _and so_ he chewed
His pigtail till he died."
Now when this kind of thing is done in earnest, the result is one of
those ill-distributed syllogisms which in rhetoric are called conceits.
"Hard was the hand that struck the blow,
Soft was the heart that bled."
I have seen this passage from Warner cited for its beauty, though I
should have thought nothing could be worse, had I not seen General
Morris's
"Her heart and morning broke together
In tears."
Of course, I would not rank with these Gloucester's
"What! will the aspiring blood of Lancaster
Sink in the ground? I thought it would have mounted";
though as mere rhetoric it belongs to the same class.
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