loved Romeo, eldest son of the Lord Monteschi; and being privily
married together, he at last poisoned himself for love of her:
she, for sorrow of his death, slew herself with his dagger." This
note, which furnishes in brief, the whole argument of Shakspeare's
play, might possibly have made the first impression on his fancy.

[8] There is nothing so improbable in the story of Romeo and
Juliet as to make us doubt the tradition that it is a real fact.
"The Veronese," says Lord Byron, in one of his letters from
Verona, "are tenacious to a degree of the truth of Juliet's story,
insisting on the fact, giving the date 1303, and showing a tomb.
It is a plain, open, and partly decayed sarcophagus, with withered
leaves in it, in a wild and desolate conventual garden--once a
cemetery, now ruined, to the very graves! The situation struck me
as very appropriate to the legend, being blighted as their
love." He might have added, that when Verona itself, with its
amphitheatre and its Palladian structures, lies level with the
earth, the very spot on which it stood will still be consecrated
by the memory of Juliet. When in Italy, I met a gentleman, who
being then "_dans le genre romantique_," wore a fragment of
Juliet's tomb set in a ring.

It is in truth a tale of love and sorrow, not of anguish and terror.
We behold the catastrophe afar off with scarcely a wish to avert it.
Romeo and Juliet _must_ die: their destiny is fulfilled: they have
quaffed off the cup of life, with all its infinite of joys and
agonies, in one intoxicating draught. What have they to do more
upon this earth? Young, innocent, loving, and beloved, they descend
together into the tomb: but Shakspeare has made that tomb a shrine
of martyred and sainted affection consecrated for the worship of all