the first scene of the second act of Measure for Measure, or to the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet. But not to leave the position, without an instance to illustrate it, I will take the easy-yielding Mrs. Quickly's relation of the circumstances of Sir John Falstaff's debt to her :

FALSTAFF. What is the gross sum that I owe thee?

HOST. Marry, if thou wert an honest man, thyself and the money too. Thou didst swear to me upon a parcel-gilt goblet, sitting in my Dolphin chamber, at the round table, by a sea-coal fire, upon Wednesday in Whitsun week, when the prince broke thy head for liking his father to a singing-man of Windsor; thou didst swear to me then, as I was washing thy wound, to marry me and make me my lady thy wife. Canst thou deny it? Did not goodwife Keech, the butcher's wife, come in then and call me gossip Quickly ?-coming in to borrow a mess of vinegar; telling us she had a good dish of prawns; whereby thou didst desire to eat some; whereby I told thee they were ill for a green wound, &c.*

And this, be it observed, is so far from being carried beyond the bounds of a fair imitation, that the poor soul's thoughts and sentences are more closely interlinked than the truth of nature would have required, but that the connections and sequence, which the habit of method can alone give, have in this instance a substitute in the fusion of passion. For the absence of method, which characterizes the uneducated, is occasioned by an habitual submission of the understanding to mere

* Henry IV. Pt. II. act ii. sc. 1.—Ed.

events and images as such, and independent of any power in the mind to classify or appropriate them. The general accompaniments of time and place are the only relations which persons of this class appear to regard in their statements. As this constitutes their leading feature, the contrary excellence, as distinguishing the well-educated man, must be referred to the contrary habit. Method, therefore, becomes natural to the mind which has been accustomed to contemplate not things only, or for their own sake alone, but likewise and chiefly the relations of things, either their relations to each other, or to the observer, or to the state and apprehension of the hearers. To enumerate and analyze these relations, with the conditions under which alone they are discoverable, is to teach the science of method.

The enviable results of this science, when knowledge has been ripened into those habits which at once secure and evince its possession, can scarcely be exhibited more forcibly as well as more pleasingly, than by contrasting with the former extract from Shakspeare the narration given by Hamlet to Horatio of the occurrences during his proposed transportation to England, and the events that interrupted his voyage :

HAM. Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting
That would not let me sleep: methought, I lay

Worse than the mutines in the bilboes. Rashly,
And praised be rashness for it-

VOL. III.

-Let us know,

I

Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well,

When our deep plots do fail: and that should teach us,
There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will.

HOR. That is most certain.

HAM. Up from my cabin,

My sea-gown scarf'd about me, in the dark
Grop'd I to find out them; had my desire;
Finger'd their packet; and, in fine, withdrew
To my own room again: making so bold,
My fears forgetting manners, to unseal
Their grand commission; where I found, Horatio,
A royal knavery; an exact command—
Larded with many several sorts of reasons,
Importing Denmark's health, and England's too,
With, ho! such bugs and goblins in my life-
That on the supervise, no leisure bated,

No, not to stay the grinding of the axe,

My head should be struck off!

HOR. Is't possible?

HAM. Here's the commission ;-read it at more leisure.*

Here the events, with the circumstances of time and place, are all stated with equal compression and rapidity, not one introduced which could have been omitted without injury to the intelligibility of the whole process. If any tendency is discoverable, as far as the mere facts are in question, it is the tendency to omission: and, accordingly, the reader will observe in the following quotation that the attention of the narrator is called back to one material circumstance, which he was hurrying by, by a direct question from the friend to whom the story

* Act v. sc. 2.

is communicated, "How was this sealed?" But by a trait which is indeed peculiarly characteristic of Hamlet's mind, ever disposed to generalize, and meditative to excess (but which, with due abatement and reduction, is distinctive of every powerful and methodizing intellect), all the digressions and enlargements consist of reflections, truths, and principles of general and permanent interest, either directly expressed or disguised in playful satire.

-I sat me down;

Devis'd a new commission; wrote it fair.
I once did hold it, as our statists do,

A baseness to write fair, and laboured much
How to forget that learning; but, sir, now
It did me yeoman's service. Wilt thou know
The effect of what I wrote ?

HOR. Aye, good my lord.

HAM. An earnest conjuration from the king,—
As England was his faithful tributary;

As love between them, like the palm, might flourish;
As peace should still her wheaten garland wear,
And stand a comma 'tween their amities,

And many such like ases of great charge—
That on the view and knowing of these contents,
Without debatement further, more or less,
He should the bearers put to sudden death,
No shriving time allowed.

HOR. How was this seal'd?

HAM. Why, even in that was heaven ordinant.

I had my father's signet in my purse,
Which was the model of that Danish seal:

Folded the writ up in the form of the other;

Subscribed it; gave't the impression; placed it safely, The changeling never known. Now, the next day

Was our sea-fight; and what to this was sequent,
Thou know'st already.

HOR. So Guildenstern and Rosencrantz go to't?

HAM. Why, man, they did make love to this employment. They are not near my conscience: their defeat

Doth by their own insinuation grow.

'Tis dangerous when the baser nature comes Between the pass and fell incensed points Of mighty opposites.*

It would, perhaps, be sufficient to remark of the preceding passage, in connection with the humorous specimen of narration,

Fermenting o'er with frothy circumstance,

in Henry IV., that if, overlooking the different value of the matter in each, we considered the form alone, we should find both immethodical,— Hamlet from the excess, Mrs. Quickly from the want, of reflection and generalization; and that method, therefore, must result from the due mean or balance between our passive impressions and the mind's own re-action on the same. Whether this re-action do not suppose or imply a primary act positively originating in the mind itself, and prior to the object in order of nature, though coinstantaneous with it in its manifestation, will be hereafter discussed. But I had a further purpose in thus contrasting these extracts from our myriadminded bard, μυριονοῦς ἅνηρ. I wished to bring forward, each for itself, these two elements of me

* Act v. sc. 2.