THE MIND OF SHAKESPERE
these lines and Hamlet's words with Horatio—
"Has this fellow no feeling of his business, that he sings at grave-making?
"Horatio. Custom hath made it in him a property of easiness.
"Hamlet. 'Tis e'en so: the hand of little employment hath the daintier sense."
Or if the sonnets and early plays of Shakspere were a training for his art, how comes it that even in the mature plays he slips into unfinished and undistinguished passages? It is usual to say that in the later work his thought overbalanced his speech, at times to the confusion of both; but it would be easier to suppose that throughout his life his moments of energetic vision alternated with very ordinary states of consciousness, and that he had little sense of the value of one condition over the other. The sonnets clearly echo older plots and
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