been to its beauties, he makes constant reference to the sea, and even
in language implying that his familiarity with it was not inferior to
that of any yachtsman who has ever sailed out of Cowes Harbour. He
uses nautical terms frequently and appropriately. Romeo's rope-ladder
is 'the high top-gallant of his joy;' King John, dying of poison,
declares 'the tackle of his heart is cracked,' and 'all the shrouds
wherewith his life should sail' wasted 'to a thread.' Polonius tells
Laertes, 'the wind sits in the shoulder of your sail'--a technical
expression, the singular propriety of which a naval critic has
recently established; whilst some of the commentators on the passage
in _King Lear_, descriptive of the prospect from Dover Cliffs, affirm
that the comparison as to apparent size, of the ship to her cock-boat,
and the cock-boat to a buoy, discover a perfect knowledge of the
relative proportions of the objects named. In _Hamlet_, _Othello_,
_The Tempest_, _The Merchant of Venice_, _The Comedy of Errors_,
_Twelfth Night_, _Winter's Tale_, _Measure for Measure_, and
_Pericles_, sea-storms are made accessory to the development of the
plot, and sometimes described with a force and truthfulness which
forbid the belief that the writer had never witnessed such scenes:
however, like Horace, it is in the darkest colours that Shakspeare
uniformly paints 'the multitudinous seas.'

In the _Winter's Tale_, we read of--

---- 'the fearful usage
(Albeit ungentle) of the dreadful Neptune.'

In _Henry V._, of 'the furrowed sea,' 'the lofty surge,' 'the
inconstant billows dancing;' in _Henry VI._, Queen Margaret finds in
the roughness of the English waters a presage of her approaching wo;