All through, from first to
last, the gentle Horace pelts with most ungentle phrases one of the
noblest objects in nature, provocative alike of our admiration and our
awe, our terror and our love.
And even Shakspeare must be ranged in the same category. The most
English of poets has not one laudatory phrase for
---- 'The seas
Which God hath given for fence impregnable'
to the poet's England. It is idle to say that Shakspeare was
inland-bred--that he knew nothing, and could therefore have cared
nothing about the matter--seeing that, insensible as he might have
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.
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