[Footnote 1: Error, entering into the world with Sin among us poor Adamites, may be said to spring from the tree of knowledge itself, and from the rotten kernels of that fatal apple.--_Howell's Letters_.]
_Old Fortunatus_.--The humor of a frantic lover in the scene where Orleans to his friend Galloway defends the passion with which himself, being a prisoner in the English king's court, is enamored to frenzy of the king's daughter Agripyna, is done to the life. Orleans is as passionate an inamorato as any which Shakspeare ever drew. He is just such another adept in Love's reasons. The sober people of the world are with him,
"A swarm of fools Crowding together to be counted wise."
He talks "pure Biron and Romeo;" he is almost as poetical as they, quite as philosophical, only a little madder. After all, Love's sectaries are a reason unto themselves. We have gone retrograde to the noble heresy, since the days when Sidney proselyted our nation to this mixed health and disease: the kindliest symptom, yet the most alarming crisis, in the ticklish state of youth; the nourisher and the destroyer of hopeful wits; the mother of twin births, wisdom and folly, valor and weakness; the servitude above freedom; the gentle mind's religion; the liberal superstition.
_The Honest Whore_.--There is in the second part of this play, where Bellafront, a reclaimed harlot, recounts some of the miseries of her profession, a simple picture of honor and shame, contrasted without violence, and expressed without immodesty; which is worth all the _strong lines_ against the harlot's profession, with which both parts of this play are offensively crowded. A satirist is always to be suspected, who, to make vice odious, dwells upon all its acts and minutest circumstances with a sort of relish and retrospective fondness. But so near are the boundaries of panegyric and invective, that a worn-out sinner is sometimes found to make the best declaimer against sin. The same high-seasoned descriptions, which in his unregenerate state served but to inflame his appetites, in his new province of a moralist will serve him, a little turned, to expose the enormity of those appetites in other men. When Cervantes, with such proficiency of fondness dwells upon the Don's library, who sees not that he has been a great reader of books of knight-errantry--perhaps was at some time of his life in danger of falling into those very extravagances which he ridiculed so happily in his hero!