In a former lecture I endeavoured to point out the union of the Poet and the Philosopher, or rather the warm embrace between them, in the Venus and Adonis and Lucrece of Shakespeare. From thence I passed on to Love's Labour's Lost, as the link between his character as a Poet, and his art as a Dramatist; and I showed that, although in that work the former was still predominant, yet that the germs of his subsequent dramatic power were easily discernible.

I will now, as I promised in my last, proceed to Romeo and Juliet, not because it is the earliest, or among the earliest of Shakespeare's works of that kind, but because in it are to be found all his excellences such as they afterwards appeared in his more perfect dramas, but differing from them in being less forcibly evidenced, and less happily combined: all the parts are more or less present, but they are not united with the same harmony. There are, however, in Romeo and Juliet passages where the poet's whole excellence is evinced, so that nothing superior to them can be met with in the productions of his after years. The main distinction between this play and others is, as I said, that the parts are less happily combined, or to borrow a phrase from the painter, the whole work is less in keeping; there was the productions of grand portions; there were the limbs of what was excellent; but the production of a whole, in which each part gives delight for itself, and the whole, gives more intellectual delight, is the effect of judgment and taste not to be attained but by painful study, and in which we give up the stronger pleasures derived from the dazzling light which a man of genius throws over every circumstance, and where we are chiefly struck by vivid and distinct images. Taste is a subsequent attainment, after the poet has been disciplined by experience, and has added to genius that talent by which he knows what part of his genius he can make intelligible to the part of mankind for which he writes.