---- 'the fearful usage
(Albeit ungentle) of the dreadful Neptune.'
In _Henry V._, of 'the furrowed sea,' 'the lofty surge,' 'the
inconstant billows dancing;' in _Henry VI._, Queen Margaret finds in
the roughness of the English waters a presage of her approaching wo;
in _Richard III._, Clarence's dream figures to us all the horrors of
'the vasty deep;' in _Henry VIII._, Wolsey indeed speaks of 'a sea of
glory,' but also of his shipwreck thereon; in _The Tempest_ we read of
'the never surfeited sea,' and of the 'sea-marge sterile and
rocky-hard;' in the _Midsummer's Night Dream_, 'the sea' is 'rude,'
and from it the winds 'suck up contagious fogs;' _Hamlet_ is as 'mad
as the sea and wind;' the violence of Laertes and the insurgent Danes
is paralleled to an irruption of the sea, 'overpeering of his list;'
in the well-known soliloquy is the expression, 'a sea of troubles,'
which, in spite of Pope's suggested and tasteless emendation,
commentators have shewn to have been used proverbially by the Greeks,
and more than once by Æschylus and Menander. Still, Shakspeare, again
like Horace, was not insensible to the merits of sea-air in a sanitary
point of view. Dionyza, meditating Marina's murder, bids her take what
the Brighton doctor's call 'a constitutional' by the sea-side, adding
that--
---- 'the air is quick there,
Piercing and sharpens well the stomach.'
As to Burns, his most fervent admirer can scarcely complain when we
involve him in the censure to which we have already subjected Horace
and Shakspeare. He, too, writes about the sea in such a fashion, that
we should hardly have suspected, what is true, that he was born almost
within hearing of its waves; that much of his life was passed on its
shores or near them, and that at a time of life when external objects
most vividly impress themselves on the senses, and exercise the
largest influence on the taste.