be'st a devil, I cannot kill thee.

'Iago.' I bleed, Sir; but not kill'd.

'Oth.' I am not sorry neither.


Think what a volley of execrations and defiances Beaumont and Fletcher
would have poured forth here!

Indeed Massinger and Ben Jonson are both more perfect in their kind than
Beaumont and Fletcher; the former in the story and affecting incidents;
the latter in the exhibition of manners and peculiarities, whims in
language, and vanities of appearance.

There is, however, a diversity of the most dangerous kind here.
Shakspeare shaped his characters out of the nature within; but we cannot
so safely say, out of his own nature as an individual person. No! this
latter is itself but a 'natura naturata',--an effect, a product, not a
power. It was Shakspeare's prerogative to have the universal, which is
potentially in each particular, opened out to him, the 'homo generalis',
not as an abstraction from observation of a variety of men, but as the
substance capable of endless modifications, of which his own personal
existence was but one, and to use this one as the eye that beheld the
other, and as the tongue that could convey the discovery. There is no
greater or more common vice in dramatic writers than to draw out of
themselves. How I--alone and in the self-sufficiency of my study, as all
men are apt to be proud in their dreams--should like to be talking
'king'! Shakspeare, in composing, had no 'I', but the 'I'
representative. In Beaumont and Fletcher you have descriptions of