have been followed by the clashing of swords between the kinsmen of the

Two households, both alike in dignity,

the interference of the disturbed and indignant citizens, --the rushing of old Montague and Capulet themselves upon the scene, and finally by "the sentence of their moved prince,”—the first mention of Romeo is marked by a sudden and pleasing transition from the hitherto harsh and prosaic tone of the dialogue, to an easy flow both of imagery and of diction, as if the gentle harmony in the spirit of the absent hero, who is now the theme of their discourse, had communicated a sweetness of modulation even to the thoughts and language of the speakers, his tender parents and his affectionate cousin :

Lady Montague. Oh, where is Romeo!-saw you him to-day?

Right glad am I, he was not at this fray.

Benvolio. Madam, an hour before the worshipp'd sun
Peer'd forth the golden window of the east,
A troubled mind drave me to walk abroad;
Where, underneath the grove of sycamore,
That westward rooteth from the city's side,
So early walking did I see your son:

Towards him I made; but he was 'ware of me,
And stole into the covert of the wood:
I, measuring his affections by my own,
That most are busied when they are most alone,
Pursued my humour, not pursuing his,

And gladly shunn'd who gladly fled from me.

Montague. Many a morning hath he there been seen,
With tears augmenting the fresh morning's dew,
Adding to clouds more clouds with his deep sighs:
But all so soon as the all-cheering sun

Should in the farthest east begin to draw
The shady curtains from Aurora's bed,
Away from light steals home my heavy son,
And private in his chamber pens himself;
Shuts up his windows, locks fair daylight out,
And makes himself an artificial night:

Black and portentous must this humour prove,
Unless good counsel may the cause remove.

Ben. My noble uncle, do you know the cause?
Mon. I neither know it nor can learn of him.

Ben. Have you impórtun'd him by any means?
Mon. Both by myself, and many other friends:
But he, his own affections' counsellor,

Is to himself-I will not say, how true-
But to himself so secret and so close,

So far from sounding and discovery,
As is the bud bit with an envious worm,

Ere he can spread his sweet leaves to the air,

Or dedicate his beauty to the sun.

Could we but learn from whence his sorrows grow,

We would as willingly give cure, as know.

Ben. See, where he comes.-So please you, step aside;

I'll know his grievance, or be much denied.

Mon. I would, thou wert so happy, by thy stay,

To hear true shrift.-Come, madam, let's away.

This is an exquisitely appropriate prelude to the first introduction of Romeo himself to our eyes and ears his supremely sensitive and imaginative nature under all the fanciful influence of a first, youthful, and unrequited passion :

Ben. Good morrow, cousin.
Romeo.

Ben. But new struck nine.

Rom.

Is the day so young?

Ah me! sad hours seem long.

Was that my father, that went hence so fast?

Ben. It was. What sadness lengthens Romeo's hours?
Rom. Not having that which having makes them short.
Ben. In love?

Rom. Out of her favour, where I am in love.

Ben. Alas, that Love, so gentle in his view,

Should be so tyrannous and rough in proof!

Rom. Alas, that Love, whose view is muffled still,

Should, without eyes, see pathways to his will!

Where shall we dine? Oh me!- What fray was here?

Yet tell me not, for I have heard it all.

Here's much to do with hate, but more with love!-
Why then,-O brawling love! O loving hate!

O anything, of nothing first create !

O heavy lightness! serious vanity!

Mis-shapen chaos of well-seeming forms!

Feather of lead! bright smoke! cold fire! sick health!
Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is!—

This love feel I, that feel no love in this.

Dost thou not laugh?

Ben.

No, coz, I rather weep.

Rom. Good heart, at what?
Ben.

At thy good heart's oppression. Rom. Why, such is love's transgression.― Griefs of mine own lie heavy in my breast; Which thou wilt propagate, to have it prest With more of thine: this love, that thou hast shown, Doth add more grief to too much of mine own.Love is a smoke, rais'd with the fume of sighs; Being purg'd, a fire, sparkling in lovers' eyes; Being vex'd, a sea, nourish'd with lovers' tears.— What is it else?-a madness most discreet, A choking gall, and a preserving sweet.Farewell, my coz.

Ben.

Soft-I will go along ;
An if you leave me so, you do me wrong.
Rom. Tut, I have lost myself; I am not here;
This is not Romeo-he's some other where.
Ben. Tell me in sadness, who she is you love.
Rom. What, shall I groan, and tell thee?
Ben.

But sadly tell me who.

Groan ?—why, no;

Rom. Bid a sick man in sadness make his willAh, word ill urg'd to one that is so ill!

In sadness, cousin, I do love a woman.

Ben. I aim'd so near, when I suppos'd you lov'd.

Rom. A right good marksman !-And she's fair I love.
Ben. A right fair mark, fair coz, is soonest hit.
Rom. Well, in that hit you miss; she'll not be hit

With Cupid's arrow; she hath Dian's wit;

And, in strong proof of chastity well arm'd,

From Love's weak childish bow she lives unharm'd:

She will not stay the siege of loving terms,

Nor bide the encounter of assailing eyes,
Nor ope her lap to saint-seducing gold.

Oh, she is rich in beauty-only poor,

That, when she dies, with beauty dies her store.

Ben. Then she hath sworn that she will still live chaste?

Rom. She hath-and in that sparing makes huge waste;

For beauty, starv'd with her severity,

Cuts beauty off from all posterity.

She is too fair, too wise-too wisely fair

To merit bliss by making me despair:

She hath forsworn to love; and in that vow

Do I live dead, that live to tell it now!

Ben. Be rul'd by me-forget to think of her.
Rom. O, teach me how I should forget to think.
Ben. By giving liberty unto thine eyes;
Examine other beauties.

To call hers, exquisite, in question more:
These happy masks, that kiss fair ladies' brows,
Being black, put us in mind they hide the fair :
He that is strucken blind, cannot forget
The precious treasure of his eyesight lost :
Shew me a mistress that is passing fair-
What doth her beauty serve, but as a note,
Where I may read who pass'd that passing fair?-
Farewell-thou canst not teach me to forget.

Ben. I'll pay that doctrine, or else die in debt.

Mrs. Jameson, in her elaborate account of the character of Juliet, commits the fundamental error of confounding this first, unrequited passion of Romeo's, which excites for him such deep anxiety in the breasts of his parents and his cousin, with one of the mere affectations belonging to chivalric manners:—

"We must remember," says she, "that in those times every young cavalier of any distinction devoted himself, at his first entrance into the world, to the service of some fair lady, who was selected to be his fancy's queen: and the more rigorous the beauty, and the more hopeless the love, the more honourable the slavery. To go about metamorphosed by a mistress,' as Speed humorously expresses it,-to maintain her supremacy in charms at the sword's point; to sigh; to walk with folded arms; to be negligent and melancholy, and to show a careless desolation, was the fashion of the day. The Surreys, the Sydneys, the Bayards, the Herberts, of the time-all those who were the mirrors 'in which the noble youth did dress themselves,' were of this fantastic school of gallantry-the last remains of the age of chivalry; and it was especially prevalent in Italy. Shakspeare has ridiculed it in many places with exquisite humour; but he wished to show us that it has its serious as well as its comic aspect. Romeo, then, is introduced to us, with perfect truth of costume, as the thrall of a dreaming, fanciful passion for the scornful Rosaline, who had forsworn to love; and on her charms and coldness, and on the power of love generally, he descants to his companions in pretty phrases, quite in the style and taste of the day."

If this view of the nature of Romeo's unrequited passion were just, what force would there be in the fair critic's observation, in a foregoing page, that "our impression of Juliet's loveliness and sensibility is enhanced, when we find it overcoming in the bosom of Romeo his previous love for another?" There

* Characteristics,' &c.—3rd edition, vol. ii. p. 175-6.

would have been little triumph to the captivation of Juliet in banishing from the hero a merely affected passion; and therefore the full-length exhibiting of such an affectation could have conduced little to Shakespeare's leading dramatic purpose in this piece. It is, on the contrary, the very pangs, the heartfelt "pangs of despis'd love," to borrow Hamlet's phrase, that he has here chosen to portray in the language and demeanour of his hero. So far from making it, according to Mrs. Jameson's notion, a matter of chivalric vanity and ostentation, we see that, up to this point of the drama, neither his parents, nor his next kinsman Benvolio, have been able to draw from him the secret as to the individual cause of the grief and dejection in which he is absorbed, and which give them the most serious uneasiness concerning him. His father does not so much as know that he is in love at all; but, lamenting his obstinate concealment of his cause of sorrow, anxiously exclaims

Black and portentous must this humour prove,
Unless good counsel may the cause remove.

Nor can his young cousin Benvolio, to whom he might be expected to be more confidential, though he draws from him the admission of his love-sick state, obtain, in the course of this dialogue, any indication as to the particular lady who is the object of his hopeless passion. Such communication, however, we must suppose to have been made before the opening of the next scene between the two cousins.

It is worthy of observation, too, that Romeo's friend of greatest gravity, Friar Laurence, and he of most levity, Mercutio, concur in attesting the seriousness of his first passion. Thus, in that subsequent scene where he acquaints the Friar with his new-born affection for Juliet, he is told by his confessor

Jesu Maria! what a deal of brine

Hath wash'd thy sallow cheeks for Rosaline!

The sun not yet thy sighs from heaven clears,
Thy old groans ring yet in my ancient ears;