_Ford._ Hum! ha! is this a vision? is this a dream? do I sleep? Mr Ford, awake; awake Mr Ford; there’s a hole made in your best coat, Mr Ford! this ’tis to be married! this ’tis to have linen and buck baskets! Well, I will proclaim myself what I am; I will now take the leacher; he is at my house, he cannot ’scape me; ’tis impossible he should; he cannot creep into a halfpenny-purse, nor into a pepper-box. But lest the devil that guides him should aid him, I will search impossible places; though what I am I cannot avoid, yet to be what I would not, shall not make me tame.
_Merry Wives of Windsor, act 3. sc. last._
These soliloquies are accurate copies of nature. In a passionate soliloquy one begins with thinking aloud; and the strongest feelings only, are expressed. As the speaker warms, he begins to imagine one listening, and gradually slides into a connected discourse.
How far distant are soliloquies generally from these models? They are indeed for the most part so unhappily executed, as to give disgust instead of pleasure. The first scene of _Iphigenia_ in Tauris discovers that princess, in a soliloquy, gravely reporting to herself her own history. There is the same impropriety in the first scene of Alcestes, and in the other introductions of Euripides, almost without exception. Nothing can be more ridiculous. It puts one in mind of that ingenious device in Gothic paintings, of making every figure explain itself by a written label issuing from its mouth. The description a parasite, in the _Eunuch_ of Terence[70], gives of himself in the form of a soliloquy, is lively; but against all the rules of propriety; for no man, in his ordinary state of mind, and upon a familiar subject, ever thinks of talking aloud to himself. The same objection lies against a soliloquy in the _Adelphi_ of the same author[71]. The soliloquy which makes the third scene, act third, of his _Heicyra_, is insufferable; for there Pamphilus, soberly and circumstantially, relates to himself an adventure which had happened to him a moment before.
Corneille is not more happy in his soliloquies than in his dialogue. Take for a specimen the first scene of _Cinna_.
Racine also is extremely faulty in the same respect. His soliloquies, almost without exception, are regular harangues, a chain completed in every link, without interruption or interval. That of Antiochus in _Berenice_[72] resembles a regular pleading, where the parties _pro_ and _con_ display their arguments at full length. The following soliloquies are equally destitute of propriety: _Bajazet_, act 3. sc. 7. _Mithridate_, act 3. sc. 4. & act 4. sc. 5. _Iphigenia_, act 4. sc. 8.