THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY.

A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.

VOL. III.--JUNE, 1859.--NO. XX.







SHAKSPEARE'S ART.

"Yet must I not give Nature all; thy Art,
My gentle SHAKSPEARE, must enjoy a part.
For though the poet's matter Nature be,
His Art doth give the fashion."--Ben Jonson.


Whoever would learn to think naturally, clearly, logically, and to
express himself intelligibly and earnestly, let him give his days and
nights to WILLIAM SHAKSPEARE. His ear will thus accustom itself to forms
of phrase whose only mannerism is occasioned by the fulness of thought
and the directness of expression; and he will not easily, through the
habits which either his understanding or his ear will acquire, fall into
the fluent cadences of that sort of writing in which words are used
without discrimination of their nice meanings,--where the sentences are
only a smoothly-undulating current of common phrases, in which it takes
a page to say weakly what should be said forcibly in a few periods.