Chapter 3 No.3

The entrance to the third period of Shakespeare is like the entrance to that lost and lesser Paradise of old,

With dreadful faces thronged, and fiery arms.

Lear, Othello, Macbeth, Coriolanus, Antony, Timon, these are names indeed of something more than tragic purport. Only in the sunnier distance beyond, where the sunset of Shakespeare's imagination seems to melt or flow back into the sunrise, do we discern Prospero beside Miranda, Florizel by Perdita, Palamon with Arcite, the same knightly and kindly Duke Theseus as of old; and above them all, and all others of his divine and human children, the crowning and final and ineffable figure of Imogen.

Of all Shakespeare's plays, King Lear is unquestionably that in which he has come nearest to the height and to the likeness of the one tragic poet on any side greater than himself whom the world in all its ages has ever seen born of time. It is by far the most ?schylean of his works; the most elemental and prim?val, the most oceanic and Titanic in conception. He deals here with no subtleties as in Hamlet, with no conventions as in Othello: there is no question of "a divided duty" or a problem half insoluble, a matter of country and connection, of family or of race; we look upward and downward, and in vain, into the deepest things of nature, into the highest things of providence; to the roots of life, and to the stars; from the roots that no God waters to the stars which give no man light; over a world full of death and life without resting-place or guidance.

But in one main point it differs radically from the work and the spirit of ?schylus. Its fatalism is of a darker and harder nature. To Prometheus the fetters of the lord and enemy of mankind were bitter; upon Orestes the hand of heaven was laid too heavily to bear; yet in the not utterly infinite or everlasting distance we see beyond them the promise of the morning on which mystery and justice shall be made one; when righteousness and omnipotence at last shall kiss each other. But on the horizon of Shakespeare's tragic fatalism we see no such twilight of atonement, such pledge of reconciliation as this. Requital, redemption, amends, equity, explanation, pity and mercy, are words without a meaning here.

As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods;

They kill us for their sport.

Here is no need of the Eumenides, children of Night everlasting; for here is very Night herself.

The words just cited are not casual or episodical; they strike the keynote of the whole poem, lay the keystone of the whole arch of thought. There is no contest of conflicting forces, no judgment so much as by casting of lots: far less is there any light of heavenly harmony or of heavenly wisdom, of Apollo or Athene from above. We have heard much and often from theologians of the light of revelation: and some such thing indeed we find in ?schylus: but the darkness of revelation is here.

For in this the most terrible work of human genius it is with the very springs and sources of nature that her student has set himself to deal. The veil of the temple of our humanity is rent in twain. Nature herself, we might say, is revealed-and revealed as unnatural. In face of such a world as this a man might be forgiven who should pray that chaos might come again. Nowhere else in Shakespeare's work or in the universe of jarring lives are the lines of character and event so broadly drawn or so sharply cut. Only the supreme self-command of this one poet could so mould and handle such types as to restrain and prevent their passing from the abnormal into the monstrous: yet even as much as this, at least in all cases but one, it surely has accomplished. In Regan alone would it be, I think, impossible to find a touch or trace of anything less vile than it was devilish. Even Goneril has her one splendid hour, her fire-flaught of hellish glory; when she treads under foot the half-hearted goodness, the wordy and windy though sincere abhorrence, which is all that the mild and impotent revolt of Albany can bring to bear against her imperious and dauntless devilhood; when she flaunts before the eyes of her "milk-livered" and "moral fool" the coming banners of France about the "plumed helm" of his slayer.

On the other side, Kent is the exception which answers to Regan on this. Cordelia, the brotherless Antigone of our stage, has one passing touch of intolerance for what her sister was afterwards to brand as indiscretion and dotage in their father, which redeems her from the charge of perfection. Like Imogen, she is not too inhumanly divine for the sense of divine irritation. Godlike though they be, their very godhead is human and feminine; and only therefore credible, and only therefore adorable. Cloten and Regan, Goneril and Iachimo, have power to stir and embitter the sweetness of their blood. But for the contrast and even the contact of antagonists as abominable as these, the gold of their spirit would be too refined, the lily of their holiness too radiant, the violet of their virtue too sweet. As it is, Shakespeare has gone down perforce among the blackest and the basest things of nature to find anything so equally exceptional in evil as properly to counterbalance and make bearable the excellence and extremity of their goodness. No otherwise could either angel have escaped the blame implied in the very attribute and epithet of blameless. But where the possible depth of human hell is so foul and unfathomable as it appears in the spirits which serve as foils to these, we may endure that in them the inner height of heaven should be no less immaculate and immeasurable.

It should be a truism wellnigh as musty as Hamlet's half cited proverb, to enlarge upon the evidence given in King Lear of a sympathy with the mass of social misery more wide and deep and direct and bitter and tender than Shakespeare has shown elsewhere. But as even to this day and even in respectable quarters the murmur is not quite duly extinct which would charge on Shakespeare a certain share of divine indifference to suffering, of godlike satisfaction and a less than compassionate content, it is not yet perhaps utterly superfluous to insist on the utter fallacy and falsity of their creed who whether in praise or in blame would rank him to his credit or discredit among such poets as on this side at least may be classed rather with Goethe than with Shelley and with Gautier than with Hugo. A poet of revolution he is not, as none of his country in that generation could have been: but as surely as the author of Julius C?sar has approved himself in the best and highest sense of the word at least potentially a republican, so surely has the author of King Lear avowed himself in the only good and rational sense of the words a spiritual if not a political democrat and socialist.

It is only, I think, in this most tragic of tragedies that the sovereign lord and incarnate god of pity and terror can be said to have struck with all his strength a chord of which the resonance could excite such angry agony and heartbreak of wrath as that of the brother kings when they smote their staffs against the ground in fierce imperious anguish of agonised and rebellious compassion, at the oracular cry of Calchas for the innocent blood of Iphigenia. The doom even of Desdemona seems as much less morally intolerable as it is more logically inevitable than the doom of Cordelia. But doubtless the fatalism of Othello is as much darker and harder than that of any third among the plays of Shakespeare, as it is less dark and hard than the fatalism of King Lear. For upon the head of the very noblest man whom even omnipotence or Shakespeare could ever call to life he has laid a burden in one sense yet heavier than the burden of Lear, insomuch as the sufferer can with somewhat less confidence of universal appeal proclaim himself a man more sinned against than sinning.

And yet, if ever man after Lear might lift up his voice in that protest, it would assuredly be none other than Othello. He is in all the prosperous days of his labour and his triumph so utterly and wholly nobler than the self-centred and wayward king, that the capture of his soul and body in the unimaginable snare of Iago seems a yet blinder and more unrighteous blow

Struck by the envious wrath of man or God

than ever fell on the old white head of that child-changed father. But at least he is destroyed by the stroke of a mightier hand than theirs who struck down Lear. As surely as Othello is the noblest man of man's making, Iago is the most perfect evildoer, the most potent demi-devil. It is of course the merest commonplace to say as much, and would be no less a waste of speech to add the half comfortable reflection that it is in any case no shame to fall by such a hand. But this subtlest and strangest work of Shakespeare's admits and requires some closer than common scrutiny. Coleridge has admirably described the first great soliloquy which opens to us the pit of hell within as "the motive-hunting of a motiveless malignity." But subtle and profound and just as is this definitive appreciation, there is more in the matter yet than even this. It is not only that Iago, so to speak, half tries to make himself half believe that Othello has wronged him, and that the thought of it gnaws him inly like a poisonous mineral: though this also be true, it is not half the truth-nor half that half again. Malignant as he is, the very subtlest and strongest component of his complex nature is not even malignity. It is the instinct of what Mr. Carlyle would call an inarticulate poet. In his immortal study on the affair of the diamond necklace, the most profound and potent humourist of his country in his century has unwittingly touched on the mainspring of Iago's character-"the very pulse of the machine." He describes his Circe de la Mothe-Valois as a practical dramatic poet or playwright at least in lieu of play-writer: while indicating how and wherefore, with all her constructive skill and rhythmic art in action, such genius as hers so differs from the genius of Shakespeare that she undeniably could not have written a Hamlet. Neither could Iago have written an Othello. (From this theorem, by the way, a reasoner or a casuist benighted enough to prefer articulate poets to inarticulate, Shakespeare to Cromwell, a fair Vittoria Colonna to a "foul Circe-Meg?ra," and even such a strategist as Homer to such a strategist as Frederic-William, would not illogically draw such conclusions or infer such corollaries as might result in opinions hardly consonant with the Teutonic-Titanic evangel of the preacher who supplied him with his thesis.) "But what he can do, that he will": and if it be better to make a tragedy than to write one, to act a poem than to sing it, we must allow to Iago a station in the hierarchy of poets very far in advance of his creator's. None of the great inarticulate may more justly claim place and precedence. With all his poetic gift, he has no poetic weakness. Almost any creator but his would have given him some grain of spite or some spark of lust after Desdemona. To Shakespeare's Iago she is no more than is a rhyme to another and articulate poet. {179} His stanza must at any rate and at all costs be polished: to borrow the metaphor used by Mr. Carlyle in apologetic illustration of a royal hero's peculiar system of levying recruits for his colossal brigade. He has within him a sense or conscience of power incomparable: and this power shall not be left, in Hamlet's phrase, "to fust in him unused." A genuine and thorough capacity for human lust or hate would diminish and degrade the supremacy of his evil. He is almost as far above or beyond vice as he is beneath or beyond virtue. And this it is that makes him impregnable and invulnerable. When once he has said it, we know as well as he that thenceforth he never will speak word. We could smile almost as we can see him to have smiled at Gratiano's most ignorant and empty threat, being well assured that torments will in no wise ope his lips: that as surely and as truthfully as ever did the tortured philosopher before him, he might have told his tormentors that they did but bruise the coating, batter the crust, or break the shell of Iago. Could we imagine a far other lost spirit than Farinata degli Uberti's endowed with Farinata's might of will, and transferred from the sepulchres of fire to the dykes of Malebolge, we might conceive something of Iago's attitude in hell-of his unalterable and indomitable posture for all eternity. As though it were possible and necessary that in some one point the extremities of all conceivable good and of all imaginable evil should meet and mix together in a new "marriage of heaven and hell," the action in passion of the most devilish among all the human damned could hardly be other than that of the most godlike among all divine saviours-the figure of Iago than a reflection by hell-fire of the figure of Prometheus.

Between Iago and Othello the position of Desdemona is precisely that defined with such quaint sublimity of fancy in the old English byword-"between the devil and the deep sea." Deep and pure and strong and adorable always and terrible and pitiless on occasion as the sea is the great soul of the glorious hero to whom she has given herself; and what likeness of man's enemy from Satan down to Mephistopheles could be matched for danger and for dread against the good bluff soldierly trustworthy figure of honest Iago? The rough license of his tongue at once takes warrant from his good soldiership and again gives warrant for his honesty: so that in a double sense it does him yeoman's service, and that twice told. It is pitifully ludicrous to see him staged to the show like a member-and a very inefficient member-of the secret police. But it would seem impossible for actors to understand that he is not a would-be detective, an aspirant for the honours of a Vidocq, a candidate for the laurels of a Vautrin: that he is no less than Lepidus, or than Antony's horse, "a tried and valiant soldier." It is perhaps natural that the two deepest and subtlest of all Shakespeare's intellectual studies in good and evil should be the two most painfully misused and misunderstood alike by his commentators and his fellows of the stage: it is certainly undeniable that no third figure of his creation has ever been on both sides as persistently misconceived and misrepresented with such desperate pertinacity as Hamlet and Iago.

And it is only when Iago is justly appreciated that we can justly appreciate either Othello or Desdemona. This again should surely be no more than the truism that it sounds; but practically it would seem to be no less than an adventurous and audacious paradox. Remove or deform or diminish or modify the dominant features of the destroyer, and we have but the eternal and vulgar figures of jealousy and innocence, newly vamped and veneered and padded and patched up for the stalest purposes of puppetry. As it is, when Coleridge asks "which do we pity the most" at the fall of the curtain, we can surely answer, Othello. Noble as are the "most blessed conditions" of "the gentle Desdemona," he is yet the nobler of the two; and has suffered more in one single pang than she could suffer in life or in death.

But if Othello be the most pathetic, King Lear the most terrible, Hamlet the subtlest and deepest work of Shakespeare, the highest in abrupt and steep simplicity of epic tragedy is Macbeth. There needs no ghost come from the grave, any reader may too probably remark, to tell us this. But in the present generation such novelties have been unearthed regarding Shakespeare that the reassertion of an old truth may seem to have upon it some glittering reflection from the brazen brightness of a brand-new lie. Have not certain wise men of the east of England-Cantabrigian Magi, led by the star of their goddess Mathesis ("mad Mathesis," as a daring poet was once ill-advised enough to dub her doubtful deity in defiance of scansion rather than of truth)-have they not detected in the very heart of this tragedy the "paddling palms and pinching fingers" of Thomas Middleton?

To the simpler eyes of less learned Thebans than these-Thebes, by the way, was Dryden's irreverent name for Cambridge, the nursing mother of "his green unknowing youth," when that "renegade" was recreant enough to compliment Oxford at her expense as the chosen Athens of "his riper age"-the likelihood is only too evident that the sole text we possess of Macbeth has not been interpolated but mutilated. In their version of Othello, remarkably enough, the "player-editors," contrary to their wont, have added to the treasure-house of their text one of the most precious jewels that ever the prodigal afterthought of a great poet bestowed upon the rapture of his readers. Some of these, by way of thanksgiving, have complained with a touch of petulance that it was out of place and superfluous in the setting: nay, that it was incongruous with all the circumstances-out of tone and out of harmony and out of keeping with character and tune and time. In other lips indeed than Othello's, at the crowning minute of culminant agony, the rush of imaginative reminiscence which brings back upon his eyes and ears the lightning foam and tideless thunder of the Pontic sea might seem a thing less natural than sublime. But Othello has the passion of a poet closed in as it were and shut up behind the passion of a hero. For all his practical readiness of martial eye and ruling hand in action, he is also in his season "of imagination all compact." Therefore it is that in the face and teeth of all devils akin to Iago that hell could send forth to hiss at her election, we feel and recognise the spotless exaltation, the sublime and sun-bright purity, of Desdemona's inevitable and invulnerable love. When once we likewise have seen Othello's visage in his mind, we see too how much more of greatness is in this mind than in another hero's. For such an one, even a boy may well think how thankfully and joyfully he would lay down his life. Other friends we have of Shakespeare's giving whom we love deeply and well, if hardly with such love as could weep for him all the tears of the body and all the blood of the heart: but there is none we love like Othello.

I must part from his presence again for a season, and return to my topic in the text of Macbeth. That it is piteously rent and ragged and clipped and garbled in some of its earlier scenes, the rough construction and the poltfoot metre, lame sense and limping verse, each maimed and mangled subject of players' and printers' most treasonable tyranny, contending as it were to seem harsher than the other, combine in this contention to bear indisputable and intolerable witness. Only where the witches are, and one more potent and more terrible than all witches and all devils at their beck, can we be sure that such traitors have not robbed us of one touch from Shakespeare's hand. The second scene of the play at least bears marks of such handling as the brutal Shakespearean Hector's of the "mangled Myrmidons"; it is too visibly "noseless, handless, hacked and chipped" as it comes to us, crying on Hemings and Condell. And it is in this unlucky scene that unkindly criticism has not unsuccessfully sought for the gravest faults of language and manner to be found in Shakespeare. For certainly it cannot be cleared from the charge of a style stiffened and swollen with clumsy braid and crabbed bombast. But against the weird sisters, and her who sits above them and apart, more awful than Hecate's very self, no mangling hand has been stretched forth; no blight of mistranslation by perversion has fallen upon the words which interpret and expound the hidden things of their evil will.

To one tragedy as to one comedy of Shakespeare's, the casual or the natural union of especial popularity with especial simplicity in selection and in treatment of character makes it as superfluous as it would be difficult to attempt any application of analytical criticism. There is nothing in them of a nature so compound or so complex as to call for solution or resolution into its primal elements. Here there is some genuine ground for the generally baseless and delusive opinion of self-complacent sciolism that he who runs may read Shakespeare. These two plays it is hardly worth while to point out by name: all probable readers will know them at once for Macbeth and As You Like It. There can hardly be a single point of incident or of character on which the youngest reader will not find himself at one with the oldest, the dullest with the brightest among the scholars of Shakespeare. It would be an equal waste of working hours or of playtime if any of these should devote any part of either a whole-schoolday or a holiday to remark or to rhapsody on the character of Macbeth or of Orlando, of Rosalind or of Lady Macbeth. He that runs, let him read: and he that has ears, let him hear.

I cannot but think that enough at least of time has been spent if not wasted by able and even by eminent men on examination of Coriolanus with regard to its political aspect or bearing upon social questions. It is from first to last, for all its turmoil of battle and clamour of contentious factions, rather a private and domestic than a public or historical tragedy. As in Julius C?sar the family had been so wholly subordinated to the state, and all personal interests so utterly dominated by the preponderance of national duties, that even the sweet and sublime figure of Portia passing in her "awful loveliness" was but as a profile half caught in the background of an episode, so here on the contrary the whole force of the final impression is not that of a conflict between patrician and plebeian, but solely that of a match of passions played out for life and death between a mother and a son. The partisans of oligarchic or democratic systems may wrangle at their will over the supposed evidences of Shakespeare's prejudice against this creed and prepossession in favour of that: a third bystander may rejoice in the proof thus established of his impartial indifference towards either: it is all nothing to the real point in hand. The subject of the whole play is not the exile's revolt, the rebel's repentance, or the traitor's reward, but above all it is the son's tragedy. The inscription on the plinth of this tragic statue is simply to Volumnia Victrix.

A loftier or a more perfect piece of man's work was never done in all the world than this tragedy of Coriolanus: the one fit and crowning epithet for its companion or successor is that bestowed by Coleridge-"the most wonderful." It would seem a sign or birthmark of only the greatest among poets that they should be sure to rise instantly for awhile above the very highest of their native height at the touch of a thought of Cleopatra. So was it, as we all know, with William Shakespeare: so is it, as we all see, with Victor Hugo. As we feel in the marvellous and matchless verses of Zim-Zizimi all the splendour and fragrance and miracle of her mere bodily presence, so from her first imperial dawn on the stage of Shakespeare to the setting of that eastern star behind a pall of undissolving cloud we feel the charm and the terror and the mystery of her absolute and royal soul. Byron wrote once to Moore, with how much truth or sincerity those may guess who would care to know, that his friend's first "confounded book" of thin prurient jingle ("we call it a mellisonant tingle-tangle," as Randolph's mock Oberon says of a stolen sheep-bell) had been the first cause of all his erratic or erotic frailties: it is not impossible that spirits of another sort may remember that to their own innocent infantine perceptions the first obscure electric revelation of what Blake calls "the Eternal Female" was given through a blind wondering thrill of childish rapture by a lightning on the baby dawn of their senses and their soul from the sunrise of Shakespeare's Cleopatra.

Never has he given such proof of his incomparable instinct for abstinence from the wrong thing as well as achievement of the right. He has utterly rejected and disdained all occasion of setting her off by means of any lesser foil than all the glory of the world with all its empires. And we need not Antony's example to show us that these are less than straws in the balance.

Entre elle et l'univers qui s'offraient à la fois

Il hésita, lachant le monde dans son choix.

Even as that Roman grasp relaxed and let fall the world, so has Shakespeare's self let go for awhile his greater world of imagination, with all its all but infinite variety of life and thought and action, for love of that more infinite variety which custom could not stale. Himself a second and a yet more fortunate Antony, he has once more laid a world, and a world more wonderful than ever, at her feet. He has put aside for her sake all other forms and figures of womanhood; he, father or creator of Rosalind, of Cordelia, of Desdemona, and of Imogen, he too, like the sun-god and sender of all song, has anchored his eyes on her whom "Ph?bus' amorous pinches" could not leave "black," nor "wrinkled deep in time"; on that incarnate and imperishable "spirit of sense," to whom at the very last

The stroke of death is as a lover's pinch,

That hurts, and is desired.

To him, as to the dying husband of Octavia, this creature of his own hand might have boasted herself that the loveliest and purest among all her sisters of his begetting,

with her modest eyes

And still conclusion, shall acquire no honour,

Demurring upon me.

To sum up, Shakespeare has elsewhere given us in ideal incarnation the perfect mother, the perfect wife, the perfect daughter, the perfect mistress, or the perfect maiden: here only once for all he has given us the perfect and the everlasting woman.

And what a world of great men and great things, "high actions and high passions," is this that he has spread under her for a footcloth or hung behind her for a curtain! The descendant of that other his ancestral Alcides, late offshoot of the god whom he loved and who so long was loth to leave him, is here as in history the visible one man revealed who could grapple for a second with very Rome and seem to throw it, more lightly than he could cope with Cleopatra. And not the Roman Landor himself could see or make us see more clearly than has his fellow provincial of Warwickshire that first imperial nephew of her great first paramour, who was to his actual uncle even such a foil and counterfeit and perverse and prosperous parody as the son of Hortense Beauharnais of Saint-Leu to the son of Letizia Buonaparte of Ajaccio. For Shakespeare too, like Landor, had watched his "sweet Octavius" smilingly and frowningly "draw under nose the knuckle of forefinger" as he looked out upon the trail of innocent blood after the bright receding figure of his brave young kinsman. The fair-faced false "present God" of his poetic parasites, the smooth triumphant patron and preserver with the heart of ice and iron, smiles before us to the very life. It is of no account now to remember that

he at Philippi kept

His sword even like a dancer:

for the sword of Antony that struck for him is in the renegade hand of Dercetas.

I have said nothing of Enobarbus or of Eros, the fugitive once ruined by his flight and again redeemed by the death-agony of his dark and doomed repentance, or the freedman transfigured by a death more fair than freedom through the glory of the greatness of his faith: for who can speak of all things or of half that are in Shakespeare? And who can speak worthily of any?

I am come now to that strange part of a task too high for me, where I must needs speak not only (as may indeed well be) unworthily, but also (as may well seem) unlovingly, of some certain portions in the mature and authentic work of Shakespeare. "Though it be honest, it is never good" to do so: yet here I cannot choose but speak plainly after my own poor conscience, and risk all chances of chastisement as fearful as any once threatened for her too faithful messenger by the heart-stricken wrath of Cleopatra.

In the greater part of this third period, taking a swift and general view of it for contrast or comparison of qualities with the second, we constantly find beauty and melody, transfigured into harmony and sublimity; an exchange unquestionably for the better: but in certain stages, or only perhaps in a single stage of it, we frequently find humour and reality supplanted by realism and obscenity; an exchange undeniably for the worse. The note of his earliest comic style was often a boyish or a birdlike wantonness, very capable of such liberties and levities as those of Lesbia's sparrow with the lip or bosom of his mistress; as notably in the parts of Boyet and Mercutio: and indeed there is a bright vein of mere wordy wilfulness running throughout the golden youth of the two plays which connects Love's Labour's Lost with Romeo and Juliet as by a thread of floss silk not always "most excellently ravelled," nor often unspotted or unentangled. In the second period this gaiety was replaced by the utmost frankness and fullness of humour, as a boy's merry madness by the witty wisdom of a man: but now for a time it would seem as if the good comic qualities of either period were displaced and ousted by mere coarseness and crudity like that of a hard harsh photograph. This ultra-Circean transformation of spirit and brutification of speech we do not find in the lighter interludes of great and perfect tragedy: for the porter in Macbeth makes hardly an exception worth naming. It is when we come upon the singular little group of two or three plays not accurately definable at all but roughly describable as tragi-comedies, or more properly in two cases at least as tragedies docked of their natural end, curtailed of the due catastrophe-it is then that we find for the swift sad bright lightnings of laughter from the lips of the sweet and bitter fool whose timeless disappearance from the stage of King Lear seems for once a sure sign of inexplicable weariness or forgetfulness on Shakespeare's part, so nauseous and so sorry a substitute as the fetid fun and rancid ribaldry of Pandarus and Thersites. I must have leave to say that the coincidence of these two in the scheme of a single play is a thing hardly bearable by men who object to too strong a savour of those too truly "Eternal Cesspools" over which the first of living humourists holds as it were for ever an everlasting nose-or rather, in one sense, does not hold but expand it for the fuller inhalation of their too congenial fumes with an apparent relish which will always seem the most deplorable to those who the most gratefully and reasonably admire that high heroic genius, for love of which the wiser sort of men must finally forgive all the noisy aberrations of his misanthropy and philobulgary, anti-Gallican and Russolatrous insanities of perverse and morbid eloquence.

The three detached or misclassified plays of Shakespeare in which alone a reverent and reasonable critic might perhaps find something rationally and really exceptionable have also this far other quality in common, that in them as in his topmost tragedies of the same period either the exaltation of his eloquence touches the very highest point of expressible poetry, or his power of speculation alternately sounds the gulfs and scales the summits of all imaginable thought. In all three of them the power of passionate and imaginative eloquence is not only equal in spirit or essence but identical in figure or in form: in those two of them which deal almost as much with speculative intelligence as with poetic action and passion, the tones and methods, types and objects of thought, are also not equal only but identical. An all but absolute brotherhood in thought and style and tone and feeling unites the quasi-tragedy of Troilus and Cressida with what in the lamentable default of as apt a phrase in English I must call by its proper designation in French the tragédie manquée of Measure for Measure. In the simply romantic fragment of the Shakespearean Pericles, where there was no call and no place for the poetry of speculative or philosophic intelligence, there is the same positive and unmistakable identity of imaginative and passionate style.

I cannot but conjecture that the habitual students of Shakespeare's printed plays must have felt startled as by something of a shock when the same year exposed for the expenditure of their sixpences two reasonably correct editions of a play unknown to the boards in the likeness of Troilus and Cressida, side by side or cheek by jowl with a most unreasonably and unconscionably incorrect issue of a much older stage favourite, now newly beautified and fortified, in Pericles Prince of Tyre. Hitherto, ever since the appearance of his first poem, and its instant acceptance by all classes from courtiers to courtesans under a somewhat dubious and two-headed form of popular success,-'vrai succès de scandale s'il en fut'-even the potent influence and unequivocal example of Rabelais had never once even in passing or in seeming affected or infected the progressive and triumphal genius of Shakespeare with a taint or touch of anything offensive to healthier and cleanlier organs of perception than such as may belong to a genuine or a pretending Puritan. But on taking in his hand that one of these two new dramatic pamphlets which might first attract him either by its double novelty as a never acted play or by a title of yet more poetic and romantic associations than its fellow's, such a purchaser as I have supposed, with his mind full of the sweet rich fresh humour which he would feel a right to expect from Shakespeare, could hardly have undergone less than a qualm or a pang of strong disrelish and distaste on finding one of the two leading comic figures of the play break in upon it at his entrance not even with "a fool-born jest," but with full-mouthed and foul-mouthed effusion of such rank and rancorous personalities as might properly pollute the lips even of some emulous descendant or antiquarian reincarnation of Thersites, on application or even apprehension of a whip cracked in passing over the assembled heads of a pseudocritical and mock-historic society. In either case we moderns at least might haply desire the intervention of a beadle's hand as heavy and a sceptral cudgel as knotty as ever the son of Laertes applied to the shoulders of the first of the type or the tribe of Thersites. For this brutal and brutish buffoon-I am speaking of Shakespeare's Thersites-has no touch of humour in all his currish composition: Shakespeare had none as nature has none to spare for such dirty dogs as those of his kind or generation. There is not even what Coleridge with such exquisite happiness defined as being the quintessential property of Swift-"anima Rabel?sii habitans in sicco-the soul of Rabelais dwelling in a dry place." It is the fallen soul of Swift himself at its lowest, dwelling in a place yet drier: the familiar spirit or less than Socratic d?mon of the Dean informing the genius of Shakespeare. And thus for awhile infected and possessed, the divine genius had not power to re-inform and re-create the d?monic spirit by virtue of its own clear essence. This wonderful play, one of the most admirable among all the works of Shakespeare's immeasurable and unfathomable intelligence, as it must always hold its natural high place among the most admired, will always in all probability be also, and as naturally, the least beloved of all. It would be as easy and as profitable a problem to solve the Rabelaisian riddle of the bombinating chim?ra with its potential or hypothetical faculty of deriving sustenance from a course of diet on second intentions, as to read the riddle of Shakespeare's design in the procreation of this yet more mysterious and magnificent monster of a play. That on its production in print it was formally announced as "a new play never staled with the stage, never clapper-clawed with the palms of the vulgar," we know; must we infer or may we suppose that therefore it was not originally written for the stage? Not all plays were which even at that date appeared in print: yet it would seem something more than strange that one such play, written simply for the study, should have been the extra-professional work of Shakespeare: and yet again it would seem stranger that he should have designed this prodigious nondescript or portent of supreme genius for the public stage: and strangest of all, if so, that he should have so designed it in vain. Perhaps after all a better than any German or Germanising commentary on the subject would be the simple and summary ejaculation of Celia-"O wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful wonderful, and yet again wonderful, and after that out of all whooping!" The perplexities of the whole matter seem literally to crowd and thicken upon us at every step. What ailed the man or any man to write such a manner of dramatic poem at all? and having written, to keep it beside him or let it out of his hands into stranger and more slippery keeping, unacted and unprinted? A German will rush in with an answer where an Englishman (non angelus sed Anglus) will naturally fear to tread.

Alike in its most palpable perplexities and in its most patent splendours, this political and philosophic and poetic problem, this hybrid and hundred-faced and hydra-headed prodigy, at once defies and derides all definitive comment. This however we may surely and confidently say of it, that of all Shakespeare's offspring it is the one whose best things lose least by extraction and separation from their context. That some cynic had lately bitten him by the brain-and possibly a cynic himself in a nearly rabid stage of anthropophobia-we might conclude as reasonably from consideration of the whole as from examination of the parts more especially and virulently affected: yet how much is here also of hyper-Platonic subtlety and sublimity, of golden and Hybl?an eloquence above the reach and beyond the snap of any cynic's tooth! Shakespeare, as under the guidance at once for good and for evil of his alternately Socratic and Swiftian familiar, has set himself as if prepensely and on purpose to brutalise the type of Achilles and spiritualise the type of Ulysses. The former is an enterprise never to be utterly forgiven by any one who ever loved from the very birth of his boyhood the very name of the son of the sea-goddess in the glorious words of Mr. Browning's young first-born poem,

Who stood beside the naked Swift-footed,

And bound [his] forehead with Proserpine's hair.

It is true, if that be any little compensation, that Hector and Andromache fare here hardly better than he: while of the momentary presentation of Helen on the dirtier boards of a stage more miry than the tub of Diogenes I would not if I could and I must not though I would say so much as one single proper word. The hysterics of the eponymous hero and the harlotries of the eponymous heroine remove both alike beyond the outer pale of all rational and manly sympathy; though Shakespeare's self may never have exceeded or equalled for subtle and accurate and bitter fidelity the study here given of an utterly light woman, shallow and loose and dissolute in the most literal sense, rather than perverse or unkindly or unclean; and though Keats alone in his most perfect mood of lyric passion and burning vision as full of fragrance as of flame could have matched and all but overmatched those passages in which the rapture of Troilus makes pale and humble by comparison the keenest raptures of Romeo.

The relative disfavour in which the play of Measure for Measure has doubtless been at all times generally held is not in my opinion simply explicable on the theory which of late years has been so powerfully and plausibly advanced and advocated on the highest poetic or judicial authority in France or in the world, that in the land of many-coloured cant and many-coated hypocrisy the type of Angelo is something too much a prototype or an autotype of the huge national vice of England. This comment is in itself as surely just and true as it is incisive and direct: but it will not cover by any manner of means the whole question. The strong and radical objection distinctly brought forward against this play, and strenuously supported by the wisest and the warmest devotee among all the worshippers of Shakespeare, is not exactly this, that the Puritan Angelo is exposed: it is that the Puritan Angelo is unpunished. In the very words of Coleridge, it is that by his pardon and his marriage "the strong indignant claim of justice" is "baffled." The expression is absolutely correct and apt: justice is not merely evaded or ignored or even defied: she is both in the older and the newer sense of the word directly and deliberately baffled; buffeted, outraged, insulted, struck in the face. We are left hungry and thirsty after having been made to thirst and hunger for some wholesome single grain at least of righteous and too long retarded retribution: we are tricked out of our dole, defeated of our due, lured and led on to look for some equitable and satisfying upshot, defrauded and derided and sent empty away.

That this play is in its very inmost essence a tragedy, and that no sleight of hand or force of hand could give it even a tolerable show of coherence or consistency when clipped and docked of its proper and rightful end, the mere tone of style prevalent throughout all its better parts to the absolute exclusion of any other would of itself most amply suffice to show. Almost all that is here worthy of Shakespeare at any time is worthy of Shakespeare at his highest: and of this every touch, every line, every incident, every syllable, belongs to pure and simple tragedy. The evasion of a tragic end by the invention and intromission of Mariana has deserved and received high praise for its ingenuity but ingenious evasion of a natural and proper end is usually the distinctive quality which denotes a workman of a very much lower school than the school of Shakespeare. In short and in fact, the whole elaborate machinery by which the complete and completely unsatisfactory result of the whole plot is attained is so thoroughly worthy of such a contriver as "the old fantastical duke of dark corners" as to be in a moral sense, if I dare say what I think, very far from thoroughly worthy of the wisest and mightiest mind that ever was informed with the spirit or genius of creative poetry.

I have one more note to add in passing which touches simply on a musical point in lyric verse; and from which I would therefore give any biped who believes that ears "should be long to measure Shakespeare" all timely warning to avert the length of his own. A very singular question, and one to me unaccountable except by a supposition which on charitable grounds I should be loth to entertain for a moment-namely, that such ears are commoner than I would fain believe on heads externally or ostensibly human,-has been raised with regard to the first immortal song of Mariana in the moated grange. This question is whether the second verse appended by Fletcher to that divine Shakespearean fragment may not haply have been written by the author of the first. The visible and audible evidence that it cannot is of a kind which must at once leap into sight of all human eyes and conviction of all human ears. The metre of Shakespeare's verse, as written by Shakespeare, is not the metre of Fletcher's. It can only seem the same to those who hear by finger and not by ear: a class now at all events but too evidently numerous enough to refute Sir Hugh's antiquated objection to the once apparently tautologous phrase of Pistol. {205}

It is of course inexplicable, but it is equally of course undeniable, that the mention of Shakespeare's Pericles would seem immediately and invariably to recall to a virtuous critical public of nice and nasty mind the prose portions of the fourth act, the whole of the prose portions of the fourth act, and nothing but the prose portions of the fourth act. To readers and writers of books who readily admit their ineligibility as members of a Society for the Suppression of Shakespeare or Rabelais, of Homer or the Bible, it will seem that the third and fifth acts of this ill-fated and ill-famed play, and with them the poetical parts of the fourth act, are composed of metal incomparably more attractive. But the virtuous critic, after the alleged nature of the vulturine kind, would appear to have eyes and ears and nose for nothing else. It is true that somewhat more of humour, touched once and again with subtler hints of deeper truth, is woven into the too realistic weft of these too lifelike scenes than into any of the corresponding parts in Measure for Measure or in Troilus and Cressida; true also that in the hands of imitators, in hands so much weaker than Shakespeare's as were Heywood's or Davenport's (who transplanted this unlovely episode from Pericles into a play of his own), these very scenes or such as they reappear unredeemed by any such relief in all the rank and rampant ugliness of their raw repulsive realism: true, again, that Fletcher has once equalled them in audacity, while stripping off the nakedness of his subject the last ragged and rude pretence at a moral purpose, and investing it instead with his very brightest robe of gay parti-coloured humour: but after all it remains equally true that to senses less susceptible of attraction by carrion than belong to the vultures of critical and professional virtue they must always remain as they have always been, something very considerably more than unattractive. I at least for one must confess myself insufficiently virtuous to have ever at any time for any moment felt towards them the very slightest touch of any feeling more attractive than repulsion. And herewith I hasten to wash my hands of the only unattractive matter in the only three of Shakespeare's plays which offer any such matter to the perceptions of any healthy-minded and reasonable human creature.

But what now shall I say that may not be too pitifully unworthy of the glories and the beauties, the unsurpassable pathos and sublimity inwoven with the imperial texture of this very play? the blood-red Tyrian purple of tragic maternal jealousy which might seem to array it in a worthy attire of its Tyrian name; the flower-soft loveliness of maiden lamentation over the flower-strewn seaside grave of Marina's old sea-tossed nurse, where I am unvirtuous enough (as virtue goes among moralists) to feel more at home and better at ease than in the atmosphere of her later lodging in Mitylene? What, above all, shall be said of that storm above all storms ever raised in poetry, which ushered into a world of such wonders and strange chances the daughter of the wave-worn and world-wandering prince of Tyre? Nothing but this perhaps, that it stands-or rather let me say that it blows and sounds and shines and rings and thunders and lightens as far ahead of all others as the burlesque sea-storm of Rabelais beyond all possible storms of comedy. The recent compiler of a most admirably skilful and most delicately invaluable compendium of Pantagruel or manual by way of guidebook to Rabelais has but too justly taken note of the irrefragable evidence there given that the one prose humourist who is to Aristophanes as the human twin-star Castor to Pollux the divine can never have practically weathered an actual gale; but if I may speak from a single experience of one which a witness long inured to Indian storm as well as Indian battle had never seen matched out of the tropics if ever overmatched within them, I should venture to say, were the poet in question any other mortal man than Shakespeare, to whom all things were better known by instinct than ever they can be to others by experience, that the painter of the storm in Pericles must have shared the adventure and relished the rapture of such an hour. None other most assuredly than himself alone could have mingled with the material passion of the elements such human passion of pathos as thrills in such tenderly sublime undertone of an agony so nobly subdued through the lament of Pericles over Thaisa. As in his opening speech of this scene we heard all the clangour and resonance of warring wind and sea, so now we hear a sound of sacred and spiritual music as solemn as the central monochord of the inner main itself.

That the three last acts of Pericles, with the possible if not over probable exception of the so-called Chorus, {210} are wholly the work of Shakespeare in the ripest fullness of his latter genius, is a position which needs exactly as much proof as does his single-handed authorship of Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, and Othello. In the fifth act is a remarkable instance of a thing remarkably rare with him; the recast or repetition in an improved and reinvigorated form of a beautiful image or passage occurring in a previous play. The now only too famous metaphor of "patience on a monument smiling at grief"-too famous we might call it for its own fame-is transfigured as from human beauty to divine, in its transformation to the comparison of Marina's look with that of "Patience gazing on kings' graves, and smiling Extremity out of act." A precisely similar parallel is one to which I have referred elsewhere; that between the two passages respectively setting forth the reciprocal love of Helena and Hermia, of Emilia and Flavina. The change of style and spirit in either case of reiteration is the change from a simpler to a sublimer form of beauty.

In the two first acts of Pericles there are faint and rare but evident and positive traces of a passing touch from the hasty hand of Shakespeare: even here too we may say after Dido:-

Nec tam aversus equos Tyria sol jungit ab urbe.

It has been said that those most unmistakable verses on "the blind mole" are not such as any man could insert into another man's work, or slip in between the lines of an inferior poet: and that they occur naturally enough in a speech of no particular excellence. I take leave decisively to question the former assertion, and flatly to contradict the latter. The pathetic and magnificent lines in dispute do not occur naturally enough, or at all naturally, among the very poor, flat, creeping verses between which they have been thrust with such over freehanded recklessness. No purple patch was ever more pitifully out of place. There is indeed no second example of such wanton and wayward liberality; but the generally lean and barren style of these opening acts does not crawl throughout on exactly the same low level.

The last of the only three plays with which I venture to find any fault on the score of moral taste is the first on my list of the only three plays belonging to this last period on which, as they now stand, I trace the indisputable track of another touch than Shakespeare's. But in the two cases remaining our general task of distinction should on the whole be simple and easy enough for the veriest babes and sucklings in the lower school of Shakespeare.

That the two great posthumous fragments we possess of Shakespeare's uncompleted work are incomplete simply because the labour spent on either was cut short by his timeless death is the first natural assumption of any student with an eye quick enough to catch the point where the traces of his hand break off; but I should now be inclined to guess rather that on reconsideration of the subjects chosen he had rejected or dismissed them for a time at least as unfit for dramatic handling. It could have needed no great expenditure of reasoning or reflection to convince a man of lesser mind and less experience than Shakespeare's that no subject could possibly be more unmanageable, more indomitably improper for such a purpose, than he had selected in Timon of Athens. How he came ever to fall across such a subject, to hit upon such a choice, we can spend no profitable time or pains in trying to conjecture. It is clear, however, that at all events there was a season when the inexplicable attraction of it was too strong for him to resist the singular temptation to embody in palpable form, to array in dramatic raiment, to invest with imaginative magnificence, the godless ascetic passion of misanthropy, the martyrdom of an atheistic Stylites. Timon is doubtless a man of far nobler type than any monomaniac of the tribe of Macarius: but his immeasurable superiority in spiritual rank to the hermit fathers of the desert serves merely to make him a thought madder and a grain more miserable than the whole Thebaid of Christomaniacs rolled into one. Foolish and fruitless as it has ever been to hunt through Shakespeare's plays and sonnets on the false scent of a fantastic trail, to put thaumaturgic trust in a dark dream of tracking his untraceable personality through labyrinthine byways of life and visionary crossroads of character, it is yet surely no blind assumption to accept the plain evidence in both so patent before us, that he too like other men had his dark seasons of outer or of inner life, and like other poets found them or made them fruitful as well as bitter, though it might be but of bitter fruit. And of such there is here enough to glut the gorge of all the monks in monkery, or strengthen for a forty days' fast any brutallest unwashed theomaniac of the Thebaid. The most unconscionably unclean of all foul-minded fanatics might have been satisfied with the application to all women from his mother upwards of the monstrous and magnificent obloquy found by Timon as insufficient to overwhelm as his gold was inadequate to satisfy one insatiable and indomitable "brace of harlots." In Troilus and Cressida we found too much that Swift might have written when half inspired by the genius of Shakespeare; in the great and terrible fourth act of Timon we find such tragedy as Juvenal might have written when half deified by the spirit of ?schylus.

There is a noticeable difference between the case of Timon and the two other cases (diverse enough between themselves) of late or mature work but partially assignable to the hand of Shakespeare. In Pericles we may know exactly how much was added by Shakespeare to the work of we know not whom; in The Two Noble Kinsmen we can tell sometimes to a hair's breadth in a hemistich by whom how much was added to the posthumous text of Shakespeare; in Timon we cannot assert with the same confidence in the same accuracy that just so many scenes and no more, just so many speeches and none other, were the work of Shakespeare's or of some other hand. Throughout the first act his presence lightens on us by flashes, as his voice peals out by fits, from behind or above the too meanly decorated altar of tragic or satiric song: in the second it is more sensibly continuous; in the third it is all but utterly eclipsed; in the fourth it is but very rarely intercepted for a very brief interval in the dark divine service of a darker Commination Day: in the fifth it predominates generally over the sullen and brooding atmosphere with the fierce imperious glare of a "bloody sun" like that which the wasting shipmen watched at noon "in a hot and copper sky." There is here no more to say of a poem inspired at once by the triune Furies of Ezekiel, of Juvenal, and of Dante.

I can imagine no reason but that already suggested why Shakespeare should in a double sense have taken Chaucer for his model or example in leaving half told a story which he had borrowed from the father and master of our narrative poetry. Among all competent scholars and all rational students of Shakespeare there can have been, except possibly with regard to three of the shorter scenes, no room for doubt or perplexity on any detail of the subject since the perfect summary and the masterly decision of Mr. Dyce. These three scenes, as no such reader will need to be told or reminded, are the two first soliloquies of the Gaoler's Daughter after the release of Palamon, and the scene of the portraits, as we may in a double sense call it, in which Emilia, after weighing against each other in solitude the likenesses of the cousins, receives from her own kinsfolk a full and laboured description of their leading champions on either side. Even setting apart for once and for a moment the sovereign evidence of mere style, we must recognise in this last instance a beautiful and significant example of that loyal and loving fidelity to the minor passing suggestions of Chaucer's text which on all possible occasions of such comparison so markedly and vividly distinguishes the work of Shakespeare's from the work of Fletcher's hand. Of the pestilent abuse and perversion to which Fletcher has put the perhaps already superfluous hints or sketches by Shakespeare for an episodical underplot, in his transmutation of Palamon's love-stricken and luckless deliverer into the disgusting burlesque of a mock Ophelia, I have happily no need as I should certainly have no patience to speak. {217}

After the always immitigable gloom of Timon and the sometimes malodorous exhalations of the three preceding plays, it is nothing less than "very heaven" to find and feel ourselves again in the midmost Paradise, the central Eden, of Shakespeare's divine discovery-of his last sweet living invention. Here again is air as pure blowing over fields as fragrant as where Dante saw Matilda or Milton saw Proserpine gathering each as deathless flowers. We still have here to disentwine or disentangle his own from the weeds of glorious and of other than glorious feature with which Fletcher has thought fit to interweave them; even in the close of the last scene of all we can say to a line, to a letter, where Shakespeare ends and Fletcher begins. That scene is opened by Shakespeare in his most majestic vein of meditative or moral verse, pointed and coloured as usual with him alone by direct and absolute aptitude to the immediate sentiment and situation of the speaker and of no man else: then either Fletcher strikes in for a moment with a touch of somewhat more Shakespearean tone than usual, or possibly we have a survival of some lines' length, not unretouched by Fletcher, from Shakespeare's first sketch for a conclusion of the somewhat calamitous and cumbrous underplot, which in any case was ultimately left for Fletcher to expand into such a shape and bring by such means to such an end as we may safely swear that Shakespeare would never have admitted: then with the entrance and ensuing narrative of Pirithous we have none but Shakespeare before us again, though it be Shakespeare undoubtedly in the rough, and not as he might have chosen to present himself after due revision, with rejection (we may well suppose) of this point and readjustment of that: then upon the arrival of the dying Arcite with his escort there follows a grievous little gap, a flaw but pitifully patched by Fletcher, whom we recognise at wellnigh his worst and weakest in Palamon's appeal to his kinsman for a last word, "if his heart, his worthy, manly heart" (an exact and typical example of Fletcher's tragically prosaic and prosaically tragic dash of incurable commonplace), "be yet unbroken," and in the flaccid and futile answer which fails so signally to supply the place of the most famous and pathetic passage in all the masterpiece of Chaucer; a passage to which even Shakespeare could have added but some depth and grandeur of his own giving, since neither he nor Dante's very self nor any other among the divinest of men could have done more or better than match it for tender and pure simplicity of words more "dearly sweet and bitter" than the bitterest or the sweetest of men's tears. Then, after the duly and properly conventional engagement on the parts of Palamon and Emilia respectively to devote the anniversary "to tears" and "to honour," the deeper note returns for one grand last time, grave at once and sudden and sweet as the full choral opening of an anthem: the note which none could ever catch of Shakespeare's very voice gives out the peculiar cadence that it alone can give in the modulated instinct of a solemn change or shifting of the metrical emphasis or ictus from one to the other of two repeated words:-

That nought could buy

Dear love; but loss of dear love!

That is a touch beyond the ear or the hand of Fletcher: a chord sounded from Apollo's own harp after a somewhat hoarse and reedy wheeze from the scrannel-pipe of a lesser player than Pan. Last of all, in words worthy to be the latest left of Shakespeare's, his great and gentle Theseus winds up the heavenly harmonies of his last beloved great poem.

And now, coming at length within the very circle of Shakespeare's culminant and crowning constellation, bathing my whole soul and spirit for the last and (if I live long enough) as surely for the first of many thousand times in the splendours of the planet whose glory is the light of his very love itself, standing even as Dante

in the clear

Amorous silence of the Swooning-sphere,

what shall I say of thanksgiving before the final feast of Shakespeare?

The grace must surely be short enough if it would at all be gracious. Even were Shakespeare's self alive again, or he now but fifteen years since gone home to Shakespeare, {220} of whom Charles Lamb said well that none could have written his book about Shakespeare but either himself alone or else he of whom the book was written, yet could we not hope that either would have any new thing to tell us of the Tempest, the Winter's Tale, and Cymbeline. And for ourselves, what else could we do but only ring changes on the word beautiful as Celia on the word wonderful in her laughing litany of love? or what better or what more can we do than in the deepest and most heartfelt sense of an old conventional phrase, thank God and Shakespeare? for how to praise either for such a gift of gifts we know not, knowing only and surely that none will know for ever.

True or false, and it would now seem something less than likely to be true, the fancy which assumed the last lines spoken by Prospero to be likewise the last words of the last completed work of Shakespeare was equally in either case at once natural and graceful. There is but one figure sweeter than Miranda's and sublimer than Prospero's in all the range of heaven on which the passion of our eyes could rest at parting. And from one point of view there is even a more heavenly quality perceptible in the light of this than of its two twin stars. In no nook or corner of the island as we leave it is any savour left or any memory lingering of any inexpiable evil. Alonzo is absolved; even Antonio and Sebastian have made no such ineffaceable mark on it by the presence of their pardoned crimes as is made by those which cost the life of Mamillius and the labours of Imogen. Poor Caliban is left in such comfort as may be allowed him by divine grace in the favourable aspect of Setebos; and his comrades go by us "reeling ripe" and "gilded" not by "grand liquor" only but also by the summer lightning of men's laughter: blown softly out of our sight, with a sound and a gust of music, by the breath of the song of Ariel.

The wild wind of the Winter's Tale at its opening would seem to blow us back into a wintrier world indeed. And to the very end I must confess that I have in me so much of the spirit of Rachel weeping in Ramah as will not be comforted because Mamillius is not. It is well for those whose hearts are light enough, to take perfect comfort even in the substitution of his sister Perdita for the boy who died of "thoughts high for one so tender." Even the beautiful suggestion that Shakespeare as he wrote had in mind his own dead little son still fresh and living at his heart can hardly add more than a touch of additional tenderness to our perfect and piteous delight in him. And even in her daughter's embrace it seems hard if his mother should have utterly forgotten the little voice that had only time to tell her just eight words of that ghost story which neither she nor we were ever to hear ended. Any one but Shakespeare would have sought to make pathetic profit out of the child by the easy means of showing him if but once again as changed and stricken to the death for want of his mother and fear for her and hunger and thirst at his little high heart for the sight and touch of her: Shakespeare only could find a better way, a subtler and a deeper chord to strike, by giving us our last glimpse of him as he laughed and chattered with her "past enduring," to the shameful neglect of those ladies in the natural blueness of whose eyebrows as well as their noses he so stoutly declined to believe. And at the very end (as aforesaid) it may be that we remember him all the better because the father whose jealousy killed him and the mother for love of whom he died would seem to have forgotten the little brave sweet spirit with all its truth of love and tender sense of shame as perfectly and unpardonably as Shakespeare himself at the close of King Lear would seem to have forgotten one who never had forgotten Cordelia.

But yet-and here for once the phrase abhorred by Cleopatra does not "allay the good" but only the bad "precedence"-if ever amends could be made for such unnatural show of seeming forgetfulness ("out on the seeming! I will write against it"-or would, had I not written enough already), the poet most assuredly has made such amends here. At the sunrise of Perdita beside Florizel it seems as if the snows of sixteen winters had melted all together into the splendour of one unutterable spring. They "smell April and May" in a sweeter sense than it could be said of "young Master Fenton": "nay, which is more," as his friend and champion Mistress Quickly might have added to mine host's commendatory remark, they speak all April and May; because April is in him as naturally as May in her, by just so many years' difference before the Mayday of her birth as went to make up her dead brother's little lot of living breath, which in Beaumont's most lovely and Shakespeare-worthy phrase "was not a life; was but a piece of childhood thrown away." Nor can I be content to find no word of old affection for Autolycus, who lived, as we may not doubt, though but a hint or promise be vouchsafed us for all assurance that he lived by favour of his "good masters" once more to serve Prince Florizel and wear three-pile for as much of his time as it might please him to put on "robes" like theirs that were "gentlemen born," and had "been so any time these four hours." And yet another and a graver word must be given with all reverence to the "grave and good Paulina," whose glorious fire of godlike indignation was as warmth and cordial to the innermost heart while yet bruised and wrung for the yet fresh loss of Mamillius.

The time is wellnigh come now for me to consecrate in this book my good will if not good work to the threefold and thrice happy memory of the three who have written of Shakespeare as never man wrote, nor ever man may write again; to the everlasting praise and honour and glory of Charles Lamb, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Walter Savage Landor; "wishing," I hardly dare to say, "what I write may be read by their light." The play of plays, which is Cymbeline, remains alone to receive the last salute of all my love.

I think, as far as I can tell, I may say I have always loved this one beyond all other children of Shakespeare. The too literal egoism of this profession will not be attributed by any candid or even commonly honest reader to the violence of vanity so much more than comical as to make me suppose that such a record or assurance could in itself be matter of interest to any man: but simply to the real and simple reason, that I wish to show cause for my choice of this work to wind up with, beyond the mere chance of its position at the close of the chaotically inconsequent catalogue of contents affixed to the first edition. In this casualty-for no good thing can reasonably be ascribed to design on the part of the first editors-there would seem to be something more than usual of what we may call, if it so please us, a happy providence. It is certain that no studious arrangement could possibly have brought the book to a happier end. Here is depth enough with height enough of tragic beauty and passion, terror and love and pity, to approve the presence of the most tragic Master's hand; subtlety enough of sweet and bitter truth to attest the passage of the mightiest and wisest scholar or teacher in the school of the human spirit; beauty with delight enough and glory of life and grace of nature to proclaim the advent of the one omnipotent Maker among all who bear that name. Here above all is the most heavenly triad of human figures that ever even Shakespeare brought together; a diviner three, as it were a living god-garland of the noblest earth-born brothers and loveworthiest heaven-born sister, than the very givers of all grace and happiness to their Grecian worshippers of old time over long before. The passion of Posthumus is noble, and potent the poison of Iachimo; Cymbeline has enough for Shakespeare's present purpose of "the king-becoming graces"; but we think first and last of her who was "truest speaker" and those who "called her brother, when she was but their sister; she them brothers, when they were so indeed." The very crown and flower of all her father's daughters,-I do not speak here of her human father, but her divine-the woman above all Shakespeare's women is Imogen. As in Cleopatra we found the incarnate sex, the woman everlasting, so in Imogen we find half glorified already the immortal godhead of womanhood. I would fain have some honey in my words at parting-with Shakespeare never, but for ever with these notes on Shakespeare; and I am therefore something more than fain to close my book upon the name of the woman best beloved in all the world of song and all the tide of time; upon the name of Shakespeare's Imogen.

APPENDIX.

NOTE ON THE HISTORICAL PLAY OF KING EDWARD III.

1879.

The epitaph of German criticism on Shakespeare was long since written by the unconscious hand which penned the following sentence; an inscription worthy of perpetual record on the registers of Gotham or in the daybook of the yet unstranded Ship of Fools.

"Thomas Lord Cromwell:-Sir John Oldcastle:-A Yorkshire Tragedy.-The three last pieces are not only unquestionably Shakespeare's, but in my opinion they deserve to be classed among his best and maturest works."

This memorable opinion is the verdict of the modest and judicious Herr von Schlegel: who had likewise in his day the condescension to inform our ignorance of the melancholy fact so strangely overlooked by the contemporaries of Christopher Marlowe, that "his verses are flowing, but without energy." Strange, but true; too strange, we may reasonably infer, not to be true. Only to German eyes has the treasure-house of English poetry ever disclosed a secret of this kind: to German ears alone has such discord or default been ever perceptible in its harmonies.

Now the facts with regard to this triad of plays are briefly these. Thomas Lord Cromwell is a piece of such utterly shapeless, spiritless, bodiless, soulless, senseless, helpless, worthless rubbish, that there is no known writer of Shakespeare's age to whom it could be ascribed without the infliction of an unwarrantable insult on that writer's memory. Sir John Oldcastle is the compound piecework of four minor playwrights, one of them afterwards and otherwise eminent as a poet-Munday, Drayton, Wilson, and Hathaway: a thin sample of poetic patchery cobbled up and stitched together so as to serve its hour for a season without falling to pieces at the first touch. The Yorkshire Tragedy is a coarse, crude, and vigorous impromptu, in which we possibly might almost think it possible that Shakespeare had a hand (or at least a finger), if we had any reason to suppose that during the last ten or twelve years of his life {232} he was likely to have taken part in any such dramatic improvisation.

The example and the exposure of Schlegel's misadventures in this line have not sufficed to warn off minor blunderers from treading with emulous confidence "through forthrights and meanders" in the very muddiest of their precursor's traces. We may notice, for one example, the revival-or at least the discussion as of something worth serious notice-of a wellnigh still-born theory, first dropped in a modest corner of the critical world exactly a hundred and seventeen years ago. Its parent, notwithstanding this perhaps venial indiscretion, was apparently an honest and modest gentleman; and the play itself, which this ingenuous theorist was fain, with all diffidence, to try whether haply he might be permitted to foist on the apocryphal fatherhood of Shakespeare, is not without such minor merits as may excuse us for wasting a few minutes on examination of the theory which seeks to confer on it the factitious and artificial attraction of a spurious and adventitious interest.

"The Raigne of King Edward the third: As it hath bin sundrie times plaied about the Citie of London," was published in 1596, and ran through two or three anonymous editions before the date of the generation was out which first produced it. Having thus run to the end of its natural tether, it fell as naturally into the oblivion which has devoured, and has not again disgorged, so many a more precious production of its period. In 1760 it was reprinted in the "Prolusions" of Edward Capell, whose text is now before me. This editor was the first mortal to suggest that his newly unearthed treasure might possibly be a windfall from the topless tree of Shakespeare. Being, as I have said, a duly modest and an evidently honest man, he admits "with candour" that there is no jot or tittle of "external evidence" whatsoever to be alleged in support of this gratuitous attribution: but he submits, with some fair show of reason, that there is a certain "resemblance between the style of" Shakespeare's "earlier performances and of the work in question"; and without the slightest show of any reason whatever he appends to this humble and plausible plea the unspeakably unhappy assertion that at the time of its appearance "there was no known writer equal to such a play"; whereas at a moderate computation there were, I should say, on the authority of Henslowe's Diary, at least a dozen-and not improbably a score. In any case there was one then newly dead, too long before his time, whose memory stands even higher above the possible ascription of such a work than that of the adolescent Shakespeare's very self.

Of one point we may be sure, even where so much is unsure as we find it here: in the curt atheological phrase of the Persian Lucretius, "one thing is certain, and the rest is lies." The author of King Edward III. was a devout student and a humble follower of Christopher Marlowe, not yet wholly disengaged by that august and beneficent influence from all attraction towards the "jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits"; and fitter on the whole to follow this easier and earlier vein of writing, half lyrical in manner and half elegiac, than to brace upon his punier limbs the young giant's newly fashioned buskin of blank verse. The signs of this growing struggle, the traces of this incomplete emancipation, are perceptible throughout in the alternate prevalence of two conflicting and irreconcilable styles; which yet affords no evidence or suggestion of a double authorship. For the intelligence which moulds and informs the whole work, the spirit which pervades and imbues the general design, is of a piece, so to speak, throughout; a point imperceptible to the eye, a touchstone intangible by the finger, alike of a scholiast and a dunce.

Another test, no less unmistakable by the student and no less indiscernible to the sciolist, is this: that whatever may be the demerits of this play, they are due to no voluntary or involuntary carelessness or haste. Here is not the swift impatient journeywork of a rough and ready hand; here is no sign of such compulsory hurry in the discharge of a task something less than welcome, if not of an imposition something less than tolerable, as we may rationally believe ourselves able to trace in great part of Marlowe's work: in the latter half of The Jew of Malta, in the burlesque interludes of Doctor Faustus, and wellnigh throughout the whole scheme and course of The Massacre at Paris. Whatever in King Edward III. is mediocre or worse is evidently such as it is through no passionate or slovenly precipitation of handiwork, but through pure incompetence to do better. The blame of the failure, the shame of the shortcoming, cannot be laid to the account of any momentary excess or default in emotion, of passing exhaustion or excitement, of intermittent impulse and reaction; it is an indication of lifelong and irremediable impotence. And it is further to be noted that by far the least unsuccessful parts of the play are also by far the most unimportant. The capacity of the author seems to shrink and swell alternately, to erect its plumes and deject them, to contract and to dilate the range and orbit of its flight in a steadily inverse degree to the proportionate interest of the subject or worth of the topic in hand. There could be no surer proof that it is neither the early nor the hasty work of a great or even a remarkable poet. It is the best that could be done at any time by a conscientious and studious workman of technically insufficient culture and of naturally limited means.

I would not, however, be supposed to undervalue the genuine and graceful ability of execution displayed by the author at his best. He could write at times very much after the earliest fashion of the adolescent Shakespeare; in other words, after the fashion of the day or hour, to which in some degree the greatest writer of that hour or that day cannot choose but conform at starting, and the smallest writer must needs conform for ever. By the rule which would attribute to Shakespeare every line written in his first manner which appeared during the first years of his poetic progress, it is hard to say what amount of bad verse or better, current during the rise and the reign of their several influences,-for this kind of echo or of copywork, consciously or unconsciously repercussive and reflective, begins with the very first audible sound of a man's voice in song, with the very first noticeable stroke of his hand in painting-it is hard to say what amount of tolerable or intolerable work might not or may not be assignable by scholiasts of the future to Byron or to Shelley, to Mr. Tennyson or to Mr. Browning. A time by this rule might come-but I am fain to think better of the Fates-when by comparison of detached words and collation of dismembered phrases the memory of Mr. Tennyson would be weighted and degraded by the ascription of whole volumes of pilfered and diluted verse now current-if not yet submerged-under the name or the pseudonym of the present {237} Viceroy-or Vice-empress is it?-of India. But the obvious truth is this: the voice of Shakespeare's adolescence had as usual an echo in it of other men's notes: I can remember the name of but one poet whose voice from the beginning had none; who started with a style of his own, though he may have chosen to annex-"annex the wise it call"; convey is obsolete-to annex whole phrases or whole verses at need, for the use or the ease of an idle minute; and this name of course is Marlowe's. So starting, Shakespeare had yet (like all other and lesser poets born) some perceptible notes in his yet half boyish voice that were not borrowed; and these were at once caught up and re-echoed by such fellow-pupils with Shakespeare of the young Master of them all-such humbler and feebler disciples, or simpler sheep (shall we call them?) of the great "dead shepherd"-as the now indistinguishable author of King Edward III.

In the first scene of the first act the impotent imitation of Marlowe is pitifully patent. Possibly there may also be an imitation of the still imitative style of Shakespeare, and the style may be more accurately definable as a copy of a copy-a study after the manner of Marlowe, not at second hand, but at third. In any case, being obviously too flat and feeble to show a touch of either godlike hand, this scene may be set aside at once to make way for the second.

The second scene is more animated, but low in style till we come to the outbreak of rhyme. In other words, the energetic or active part is at best passable-fluent and decent commonplace: but where the style turns undramatic and runs into mere elegiacs, a likeness becomes perceptible to the first elegiac style of Shakespeare. Witness these lines spoken by the King in contemplation of the Countess of Salisbury's beauty, while yet struggling against the nascent motions of a base love:-

Now in the sun alone it doth not lie

With light to take light from a mortal eye:

For here two day-stars that mine eyes would see

More than the sun steal mine own light from me.

Contemplative desire! desire to be

In contemplation that may master thee!

Decipit exemplar vitiis imitabile: if Shakespeare ever saw or heard these pretty lines, he should have felt the unconscious rebuke implied in such close and facile imitation of his own early elegiacs. As a serious mimicry of his first manner, a critical parody summing up in little space the sweet faults of his poetic nonage, with its barren overgrowth of unprofitable flowers,-bright point, soft metaphor, and sweet elaborate antithesis-this is as good of its kind as anything between Aristophanes and Horace Smith. Indeed, it may remind us of that parody on the soft, superfluous, flowery and frothy style of Agathon, which at the opening of the Thesmophoriazus? cannot but make the youngest and most ignorant reader laugh, though the oldest and most learned has never set eyes on a line of the original verses which supplied the incarnate god of comic song with matter for such exquisite burlesque.

To the speech above cited the reply of the Countess is even gracefuller, and closer to the same general model of fanciful elegiac dialogue:-

Let not thy presence, like the April sun,

Flatter our earth, and suddenly be done:

More happy do not make our outward wall

Than thou wilt grace our inward house withal.

Our house, my liege, is like a country swain,

Whose habit rude, and manners blunt and plain.

Presageth naught; yet inly beautified

With bounty's riches, and fair hidden pride;

For where the golden ore doth buried lie,

The ground, undecked with nature's tapestry,

Seems barren, sere, unfertile, fruitless, dry;

And where the upper turf of earth doth boast

His pride, perfumes, {239} and particoloured cost,

Delve there, and find this issue and their pride

To spring from ordure and corruption's side.

But, to make up my all too long compare,

These ragged walls no testimony are

What is within; but, like a cloak, doth hide

From weather's waste the under garnished pride.

More gracious than my terms can let thee be,

Entreat thyself to stay awhile with me.

Not only the exquisite grace of this charming last couplet, but the smooth sound strength, the fluency and clarity of the whole passage, may serve to show that the original suggestion of Capell, if (as I think) untenable, was not (we must admit) unpardonable. The very oversight perceptible to any eye and painful to any ear not sealed up by stepdame nature from all perception of pleasure or of pain derivable from good verse or bad-the reckless reiteration of the same rhyme with but one poor couplet intervening-suggests rather the oversight of an unfledged poet than the obtuseness of a full-grown poeticule or poetaster.

But of how many among the servile or semi-servile throng of imitators in every generation may not as much as this be said by tolerant or kindly judges! Among the herd of such diminutives as swarm after the heel or fawn upon the hand of Mr. Tennyson, more than one, more than two or three, have come as close as his poor little viceregal or vice-imperial parasite to the very touch and action of the master's hand which feeds them unawares from his platter as they fawn; as close as this nameless and short-winded satellite to the gesture and the stroke of Shakespeare's. For this also must be noted; that the resemblance here is but of stray words, of single lines, of separable passages. The whole tone of the text, the whole build of the play, the whole scheme of the poem, is far enough from any such resemblance. The structure, the composition, is feeble, incongruous, inadequate, effete. Any student will remark at a first glance what a short-breathed runner, what a broken-winded athlete in the lists of tragic verse, is the indiscoverable author of this play.

There is another point which the Neo-Shakespearean synagogue will by no man be expected to appreciate; for to apprehend it requires some knowledge and some understanding of the poetry of the Shakespearean age-so surely we now should call it, rather than Elizabethan or Jacobean, for the sake of verbal convenience, if not for the sake of literary decency; and such knowledge or understanding no sane man will expect to find in any such quarter. Even in the broad coarse comedy of the period we find here and there the same sweet and simple echoes of the very cradle-song (so to call it) of our drama: so like Shakespeare, they might say who knew nothing of Shakespeare's fellows, that we cannot choose but recognise his hand. Here as always first in the field-the genuine and golden harvest-field of Shakespearean criticism, Charles Lamb has cited a passage from Green's Tu Quoque-a comedy miserably misreprinted in Dodsley's Old Plays-on which he observes that "this is so like Shakespeare, that we seem to remember it," being as it is a girl's gentle lamentation over the selfish, exacting, suspicious and trustless love of man, as contrasted with the swift simple surrender of a woman's love at the first heartfelt appeal to her pity-"we seem to remember it," says Lamb, as a speech of Desdemona uttered on a first perception or suspicion of jealousy or alienation in Othello. This lovely passage, if I dare say so in contravention to the authority of Lamb, is indeed as like the manner of Shakespeare as it can be-to eyes ignorant of what his fellows can do; but it is not like the manner of the Shakespeare who wrote Othello. This, however, is beside the question. It is very like the Shakespeare who wrote the Comedy of Errors-Love's Labour's Lost-Romeo and Juliet. It is so like that had we fallen upon it in any of these plays it would long since have been a household word in all men's mouths for sweetness, truth, simplicity, perfect and instinctive accuracy of touch. It is very much liker the first manner of Shakespeare than any passage in King Edward III. And no Sham Shakespearean critic that I know of has yet assigned to the hapless object of his howling homage the authorship of Green's Tu Quoque.

Returning to our text, we find in the short speech of the King with which the first act is wound up yet another couplet which has the very ring in it of Shakespeare's early notes-the catch at words rather than play on words which his tripping tongue in youth could never resist:

Countess, albeit my business urgeth me,

It shall attend while I attend on thee.

And with this pretty little instance of courtly and courteous euphuism we pass from the first to the second and most important act in the play.

Any reader well versed in the text of Shakespeare, and ill versed in the work of his early rivals and his later pupils, might surely be forgiven if on a first reading of the speech with which this act opens he should cry out with Capell that here at least was the unformed hand of the Master perceptible and verifiable indeed. The writer, he might say, has the very glance of his eye, the very trick of his gait, the very note of his accent. But on getting a little more knowledge, such a reader will find the use of it in the perception to which he will have attained that in his early plays, as in his two early poems, the style of Shakespeare was not for the most part distinctively his own. It was that of a crew, a knot of young writers, among whom he found at once both leaders and followers to be guided and to guide. A mere glance into the rich lyric literature of the period will suffice to show the dullest eye and teach the densest ear how nearly innumerable were the Englishmen of Elizabeth's time who could sing in the courtly or pastoral key of the season, each man of them a few notes of his own, simple or fantastic, but all sweet, clear, genuine of their kind:-

Facies non omnibus una,

Nec diversa tamen:

and yet so close is the generic likeness between flower and flower of the same lyrical garden that the first half of the quotation seems but half applicable here. In Bird's, Morley's, Dowland's collections of music with the words appended-in such jewelled volumes as England's Helicon and Davison's Poetical Rhapsody-their name is Legion, their numbers are numberless. You cannot call them imitators, this man of that, or all of any; they were all of one school, but it was a school without a master or a head. And even so it was with the earliest sect or gathering of dramatic writers in England. Marlowe alone stood apart and above them all-the young Shakespeare among the rest; but among these we cannot count, we cannot guess, how many were wellnigh as competent as he to continue the fluent rhyme, to prolong the facile echo, of Greene and Peele, their first and most famous leaders.

No more docile or capable pupil could have been desired by any master in any art than the author of David and Bethsabe has found in the writer of this second act. He has indeed surpassed his model, if not in grace and sweetness, yet in taste or tact of expression, in continuity and equality of style. Vigour is not the principal note of his manner, but compared with the soft effusive ebullience of his master's we may fairly call it vigorous and condensed. But all this merit or demerit is matter of mere language only. The poet-a very pretty poet in his way, and doubtless capable of gracious work enough in the idyllic or elegiac line of business-shows about as much capacity to grasp and handle the fine intimacies of character and the large issues of circumstance to any tragic or dramatic purpose, as might be expected from an idyllic or elegiac poet who should suddenly assume the buskin of tragedy. Let us suppose that Moschus, for example, on the strength of having written a sweeter elegy than ever before was chanted over the untimely grave of a friend and fellow-singer, had said within himself, "Go to, I will be Sophocles"; can we imagine that the tragic result would have been other than tragical indeed for the credit of his gentle name, and comical indeed for all who might have envied the mild and modest excellence which fashion or hypocrisy might for years have induced them to besprinkle with the froth and slaver of their promiscuous and pointless adulation?

As the play is not more generally known than it deserves to be,-or perhaps we may say it is somewhat less known, though its claim to general notice is faint indeed compared with that of many a poem of its age familiar only to special students in our own-I will transcribe a few passages to show how far the writer could reach at his best; leaving for others to indicate how far short of that not inaccessible point he is too generally content to fall and to remain.

The opening speech is spoken by one Lodowick, a parasite of the King's; who would appear, like Fran?ois Villon under the roof of his Fat Madge, to have succeeded in reconciling the professional duties-may I not say, the generally discordant and discrepant offices?-of a poet and a pimp.

I might perceive his eye in her eye lost,

His ear to drink her sweet tongue's utterance;

And changing passion, like inconstant clouds,

That, rackt upon the carriage of the winds,

Increase, and die, in his disturbèd cheeks.

Lo, when she blushed, even then did he look pale;

As if her cheeks by some enchanted power

Attracted had the cherry blood from his: {245a}

Anon, with reverent fear when she grew pale,

His cheeks put on their scarlet ornaments;

But no more like her oriental red

Than brick to coral, or live things to dead. {245b}

Why did he then thus counterfeit her looks?

If she did blush, 'twas tender modest shame,

Being in the sacred presence of a king;

If he did blush, 'twas red immodest shame

To vail his eyes amiss, being a king;

If she looked pale, 'twas silly woman's fear

To bear herself in presence of a king;

If he looked pale, it was with guilty fear

To dote amiss, being a mighty king.

This is better than the insufferable style of Locrine, which is in great part made up of such rhymeless couplets, each tagged with an empty verbal antithesis; but taken as a sample of dramatic writing, it is but just better than what is utterly intolerable. Dogberry has defined it exactly; it is most tolerable-and not to be endured.

The following speech of King Edward is in that better style of which the author's two chief models were not at their best incapable for awhile under the influence and guidance (we may suppose) of their friend Marlowe.

She is grown more fairer far since I came hither;

Her voice more silver every word than other,

Her wit more fluent. What a strange discourse

Unfolded she of David and his Scots!

Even thus, quoth she, he spake-and then spake broad,

With epithets and accents of the Scot;

But somewhat better than the Scot could speak:

And thus, quoth she-and answered then herself;

For who could speak like her? but she herself

Breathes from the wall an angel's note from heaven

Of sweet defiance to her barbarous foes.

When she would talk of peace, methinks her tongue

Commanded war to prison; {246} when of war,

It wakened C?sar from his Roman grave

To hear war beautified by her discourse.

Wisdom is foolishness, but in her tongue;

Beauty a slander, but in her fair face;

There is no summer but in her cheerful looks,

Nor frosty winter but in her disdain.

I cannot blame the Scots that did besiege her,

For she is all the treasure of our land;

But call them cowards that they ran away,

Having so rich and fair a cause to stay.

But if for a moment we may fancy that here and there we have caught such an echo of Marlowe as may have fallen from the lips of Shakespeare in his salad days, in his period of poetic pupilage, we have but a very little way to go forward before we come upon indisputable proof that the pupil was one of feebler hand and fainter voice than Shakespeare. Let us take the passage on poetry, beginning-

Now, Lodowick, invocate {247} some golden Muse

To bring thee hither an enchanted pen;

and so forth. No scholar in English poetry but will recognise at once the flat and futile imitation of Marlowe; not of his great general style alone, but of one special and transcendant passage which can never be too often quoted.

If all the pens that ever poets held

Had fed the feeling of their masters' thoughts,

And every sweetness that inspired their hearts,

Their minds, and muses on admirèd themes;

If all the heavenly quintessence they still

From their immortal flowers of poesy,

Wherein, as in a mirror, we perceive

The highest reaches of a human wit;

If these had made one poem's period,

And all combined in beauty's worthiness,

Yet should there hover in their restless heads

One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the least,

Which into words no virtue can digest. {248}

Infinite as is the distance between the long roll of these mighty lines and the thin tinkle of their feeble imitator's, yet we cannot choose but catch the ineffectual note of a would-be echo in the speech of the King to his parasite-

For so much moving hath a poet's pen, etc., etc.

It is really not worth while to transcribe the poor meagre versicles at length: but a glance at the text will show how much fitter was their author to continue the tradition of Peele than to emulate the innovations of Marlowe. In the speeches that follow there is much pretty verbiage after the general manner of Elizabethan sonnetteers, touched here and there with something of a higher tone; but the whole scene drags, flags, halts onward at such a languid rate, that to pick out all the prettiest lines by way of sample would give a favourable impression but too likely to be reversed on further and fuller acquaintance.

Forget not to set down, how passionate,

How heart-sick, and how full of languishment,

Her beauty makes me. . . . . .

Write on, while I peruse her in my thoughts.

Her voice to music, or the nightingale:

To music every summer-leaping swain

Compares his sunburnt lover when she speaks;

And why should I speak of the nightingale?

The nightingale sings of adulterate wrong;

And that, compared, is too satirical:

For sin, though sin, would not be so esteemed;

But rather virtue sin, sin virtue deemed.

Her hair, far softer than the silkworm's twist,

Like as a flattering glass, doth make more fair

The yellow amber:-Like a flattering glass

Comes in too soon; for, writing of her eyes,

I'll say that like a glass they catch the sun,

And thence the hot reflection doth rebound

Against my breast, and burns the heart within.

Ah, what a world of descant makes my soul

Upon this voluntary ground of love!

"Pretty enough, very pretty! but" exactly as like and as near the style of Shakespeare's early plays as is the style of Constable's sonnets to that of Shakespeare's. Unless we are to assign to the Master every unaccredited song, sonnet, elegy, tragedy, comedy, and farce of his period, which bears the same marks of the same date-a date, like our own, of too prolific and imitative production-as we find inscribed on the greater part of his own early work; unless we are to carry even as far as this the audacity and arrogance of our sciolism, we must somewhere make a halt-and it must be on the near side of such an attribution as that of King Edward III. to the hand of Shakespeare.

With the disappearance of the poetic pimp and the entrance of the unsuspecting Countess, the style rises yet again-and really, this time, much to the author's credit. It would need a very fine touch from a very powerful hand to improve on the delicacy and dexterity of the prelude or overture to the King's avowal of adulterous love. But when all is said, though very delicate and very dexterous, it is not forcible work: I do not mean by forcible the same as violent, spasmodic, emphatic beyond the modesty of nature; a poet is of course only to be commended, and that heartily, for keeping within this bound; but he is not to be commended for coming short of it. This whole scene is full of mild and temperate beauty, of fanciful yet earnest simplicity; but the note of it, the expression, the dominant key of the style, is less appropriate to the utterance of a deep and deadly passion than-at the utmost-of what modern tongues might call a strong and rather dangerous flirtation. Passion, so to speak, is quite out of this writer's call; the depths and heights of manly as of womanly emotion are alike beyond his reach.

Thought and affliction, passion, hell itself,

He turns to favour and to prettiness.

"To favour and to prettiness"; the definition of his utmost merit and demerit, his final achievement and shortcoming, is here complete and exact. Witness the sweet quiet example of idyllic work which I extract from a scene beginning in the regular am?b?an style of ancient pastoral.

Edward. Thou hear'st me say that I do dote on thee.

Countess. If on my beauty, take it if thou canst;

Though little, I do prize it ten times less:

If on my virtue, take it if thou canst;

For virtue's store by giving doth augment:

Be it on what it will that I can give

And thou canst take away, inherit it.

Edward. It is thy beauty that I would enjoy.

Countess. O, were it painted, I would wipe it off,

And dispossess myself to give it thee:

But, sovereign, it is soldered to my life;

Take one and both; for like an humble shadow

It haunts the sunshine of my summer's life.

Edward. But thou mayst lend it me to sport withal.

Countess. As easy may my intellectual soul

Be lent away, and yet my body live,

As lend my body, palace to my soul,

Away from her, and yet retain my soul.

My body is her bower, her court, her abbey,

And she an angel, pure, divine, unspotted;

If I should lend her house, my lord, to thee,

I kill my poor soul, and my poor soul me.

Once more, this last couplet is very much in the style of Shakespeare's sonnets; nor is it wholly unlike even the dramatic style of Shakespeare in his youth-and some dozen other poets or poeticules of the time. But throughout this part of the play the recurrence of a faint and intermittent resemblance to Shakespeare is more frequently noticeable than elsewhere. {252} A student of imperfect memory but not of defective intuition might pardonably assign such couplets, on hearing them cited, to the master-hand itself; but such a student would be likelier to refer them to the sonnetteer than to the dramatist. And a casual likeness to the style of Shakespeare's sonnets is not exactly sufficient evidence to warrant such an otherwise unwarrantable addition of appendage to the list of Shakespeare's plays.

A little further on we come upon the first and last passage which does actually recall by its wording a famous instance of the full and ripened style of Shakespeare.

He that doth clip or counterfeit your stamp

Shall die, my lord: and will your sacred self

Commit high treason 'gainst the King of heaven,

To stamp his image in forbidden metal,

Forgetting your allegiance and your oath?

In violating marriage' sacred law

You break a greater honour than yourself;

To be a king is of a younger house

Than to be married: your progenitor,

Sole reigning Adam on the universe,

By God was honoured for a married man,

But not by him anointed for a king.

Every possible reader, I suppose, will at once bethink himself of the famous passage in Measure for Measure which here may seem to be faintly prefigured:

It were as good

To pardon him that hath from nature stolen

A man already made, as to remit

Their saucy sweetness, that do coin heaven's image

In stamps that are forbid:

and the very difference of style is not wider than the gulf which gapes between the first style of Shakespeare and the last. But men of Shakespeare's stamp, I venture to think, do not thus repeat themselves. The echo of the passage in A Midsummer Night's Dream, describing the girlish friendship of Hermia and Helena, which we find in the first act of The Two Noble Kinsmen, describing the like girlish friendship of Emilia and Flavina, is an echo of another sort. Both, I need hardly say, are unquestionably Shakespeare's; but the fashion in which the matured poet retouches and completes the sketch of his earlier years-composes an oil painting, as it were, from the hints and suggestions of a water-colour sketch long since designed and long since half forgotten-is essentially different from the mere verbal and literal trick of repetition which sciolists might think to detect in the present instance. Again we must needs fall back on the inevitable and indefinable test of style; a test which could be of no avail if we were foolish enough to appeal to scholiasts and their attendant dunces, but which should be of some avail if we appeal to experts and their attentive scholars; and by this test we can but remark that neither the passage in A Midsummer Night's Dream nor the corresponsive passage in The Two Noble Kinsmen could have been written by any hand known to us but Shakespeare's; whereas the passage in King Edward III. might as certainly have been written by any one out of a dozen poets then living as the answering passage in Measure for Measure could assuredly have been written by Shakespeare alone.

As on a first reading of the Hippolytus of Euripides we feel that, for all the grace and freshness and lyric charm of its opening scenes, the claim of the poem to our ultimate approval or disapproval must needs depend on the success or failure of the first interview between Theseus and his calumniated son; and as on finding that scene to be feeble and futile and prosaic and verbose we feel that the poet who had a woman's spite against women has here effectually and finally shown himself powerless to handle the simplest elements of masculine passion, of manly character and instinct; so in this less important case we feel that the writer, having ventured on such a subject as the compulsory temptation of a daughter by a father, who has been entrapped into so shameful an undertaking through the treacherous exaction of an equivocal promise unwarily confirmed by an inconsiderate oath, must be judged by the result of his own enterprise; must fail or stand as a poet by its failure or success. And his failure is only not complete; he is but just redeemed from utter discomfiture by the fluency and simplicity of his equable but inadequate style. Here as before we find plentiful examples of the gracefully conventional tone current among the lesser writers of the hour.

Warwick. How shall I enter on this graceless errand?

I must not call her child; for where's the father

That will in such a suit seduce his child?

Then, Wife of Salisbury;-shall I so begin?

No, he's my friend; and where is found the friend

That will do friendship such endamagement?-{255}

Neither my daughter, nor my dear friend's wife,

I am not Warwick, as thou think'st I am,

But an attorney from the court of hell;

That thus have housed my spirit in his form

To do a message to thee from the king.

This beginning is fair enough, if not specially fruitful in promise; but the verses following are of the flattest order of commonplace. Hay and grass and the spear of Achilles-of which tradition

the moral is,

What mighty men misdo, they can amend-

these are the fresh and original types on which our little poet is compelled to fall back for support and illustration to a scene so full of terrible suggestion and pathetic possibility.

The king will in his glory hide thy shame;

And those that gaze on him to find out thee

Will lose their eyesight, looking on the sun.

What can one drop of poison harm the sea,

Whose hugy vastures can digest the ill

And make it lose its operation?

And so forth, and so forth; ad libitum if not ad nauseam. Let us take but one or two more instances of the better sort.

Countess. Unnatural besiege! Woe me unhappy,

To have escaped the danger of my foes,

And to be ten times worse invir'd by friends!

(Here we come upon two more words unknown to Shakespeare; {256} besiege, as a noun substantive, and invired for environed.)

Hath he no means to stain my honest blood

But to corrupt the author of my blood

To be his scandalous and vile soliciter?

No marvel though the branches be infected,

When poison hath encompassèd the roots;

No marvel though the leprous infant die,

When the stern dam envenometh the dug.

Why then, give sin a passport to offend,

And youth the dangerous rein of liberty;

Blot out the strict forbidding of the law;

And cancel every canon that prescribes

A shame for shame or penance for offence.

No, let me die, if his too boisterous will

Will have it so, before I will consent

To be an actor in his graceless lust.

Warwick. Why, now thou speak'st as I would have thee speak;

And mark how I unsay my words again.

An honourable grave is more esteemed

Than the polluted closet of a king;

The greater man, the greater is the thing,

Be it good or bad, that he shall undertake;

An unreputed mote, flying in the sun,

Presents a greater substance than it is;

The freshest summer's day doth soonest taint

The loathèd carrion that it seems to kiss;

Deep are the blows made with a mighty axe;

That sin doth ten times aggravate itself

That is committed in a holy place;

An evil deed, done by authority,

Is sin, and subornation: Deck an ape

In tissue, and the beauty of the robe

Adds but the greater scorn unto the beast.

(Here are four passably good lines, which vaguely remind the reader of something better read elsewhere; a common case enough with the more tolerable work of small imitative poets.)

A spacious field of reasons could I urge

Between his glory, daughter, and thy shame:

That poison shows worst in a golden cup;

Dark night seems darker by the lightning flash;

Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds;

And every glory that inclines to sin,

The shame is treble by the opposite.

So leave I, with my blessing in thy bosom;

Which then convert to a most heavy curse,

When thou convert'st from honour's golden name

To the black faction of bed-blotting shame! [Exit.

Countess. I'll follow thee:-And when my mind turns so,

My body sink my soul in endless woe! [Exit.

So much for the central and crowning scene, the test, the climax, the hinge on which the first part of this play turns; and seems to me, in turning, to emit but a feeble and rusty squeak. No probable reader will need to be reminded that the line which I have perhaps unnecessarily italicised appears also as the last verse in the ninety-fourth of those "sugared sonnets" which we know were in circulation about the time of this play's first appearance among Shakespeare's "private friends"; in other words, which enjoyed such a kind of public privacy or private publicity as one or two among the most eminent English poets of our own day have occasionally chosen for some part of their work, to screen it for awhile as under the shelter and the shade of crepuscular laurels, till ripe for the sunshine or the storm of public judgment. In the present case, this debatable verse looks to me more like a loan or maybe a theft from Shakespeare's private store of undramatic poetry than a misapplication by its own author to dramatic purposes of a line too apt and exquisite to endure without injury the transference from its original setting.

The scene ensuing winds up the first part of this composite (or rather, in one sense of the word, incomposite) poem. It may, on the whole, be classed as something more than passably good: it is elegant, lively, even spirited in style; showing at all events a marked advance upon the scene which I have already stigmatised as a failure-that which attempts to render the interview between Warwick and the King. It is hardly, however, I should say, above the highest reach of Greene or Peele at the smoothest and straightest of his flight. At its opening, indeed, we come upon a line which inevitably recalls one of the finest touches in a much later and deservedly more popular historical drama. On being informed by Derby that

The king is in his closet, malcontent,

For what I know not, but he gave in charge,

Till after dinner, none should interrupt him;

The Countess Salisbury, and her father Warwick.

Artois, and all, look underneath the brows;

on receiving, I say, this ominous intimation, the prompt and statesmanlike sagacity of Audley leads him at once as by intuition to the inference thus eloquently expressed in a strain of thrilling and exalted poetry;

Undoubtedly, then something is amiss.

Who can read this without a reminiscence of Sir Christopher Hatton's characteristically cautious conclusion at sight of the military preparations arrayed against the immediate advent of the Armada?

I cannot but surmise-forgive, my friend,

If the conjecture's rash-I cannot but

Surmise the state some danger apprehends!

With the entrance of the King the tone of this scene naturally rises-"in good time," as most readers will say. His brief interview with the two nobles has at least the merit of ease and animation.

Derby. Befall my sovereign all my sovereign's wish!

Edward. Ah, that thou wert a witch, to make it so!

Derby. The emperor greeteth you.

Edward. Would it were the countess!

Derby. And hath accorded to your highness' suit.

Edward. Thou liest, she hath not: But I would she had!

Audley. All love and duty to my lord the king!

Edward. Well, all but one is none:-What news with you?

Audley. I have, my liege, levied those horse and foot,

According to your charge, and brought them hither.

Edward. Then let those foot trudge hence upon those horse

According to their discharge, and begone.-

Derby. I'll look upon the countess' mind

Anon.

Derby. The countess' mind, my liege?

Edward. I mean, the emperor:-Leave me alone.

Audley. What's in his mind?

Derby. Let's leave him to his humour.

[Exeunt DERBY and AUDLEY

Edward. Thus from the heart's abundance speaks the tongue

Countess for emperor: And indeed, why not?

She is as imperator over me;

And I to her

Am as a kneeling vassal, that observes

The pleasure or displeasure of her eye.

In this little scene there is perhaps on the whole more general likeness to Shakespeare's earliest manner than we can trace in any other passage of the play. But how much of Shakespeare's earliest manner may be accounted the special and exclusive property of Shakespeare?

After this dismissal of the two nobles, the pimping poeticule, Villon manqué or (whom shall we call him?) réussi, reappears with a message to C?sar (as the King is pleased to style himself) from "the more than Cleopatra's match" (as he designates the Countess), to intimate that "ere night she will resolve his majesty." Hereupon an unseasonable "drum within" provokes Edward to the following remonstrance:

What drum is this, that thunders forth this march,

To start the tender Cupid in my bosom?

Poor sheepskin, how it brawls with him that beateth it!

Go, break the thundering parchment bottom out,

And I will teach it to conduct sweet lines

("That's bad; conduct sweet lines is bad.")

Unto the bosom of a heavenly nymph:

For I will use it as my writing paper;

And so reduce him, from a scolding drum,

To be the herald, and dear counsel-bearer,

Betwixt a goddess and a mighty king.

Go, bid the drummer learn to touch the lute,

Or hang him in the braces of his drum;

For now we think it an uncivil thing

To trouble heaven with such harsh resounds.

Away! [Exit Lodowick.

The quarrel that I have requires no arms

But these of mine; and these shall meet my foe

In a deep march of penetrable groans;

My eyes shall be my arrows; and my sighs

Shall serve me as the vantage of the wind

To whirl away my sweet'st {261} artillery:

Ah, but, alas, she wins the sun of me,

For that is she herself; and thence it comes

That poets term the wanton warrior blind;

But love hath eyes as judgment to his steps,

Till too much lovèd glory dazzles them.

Hereupon Lodowick introduces the Black Prince (that is to be), and "retires to the door." The following scene opens well, with a tone of frank and direct simplicity.

Edward. I see the boy. O, how his mother's face,

Moulded in his, corrects my strayed desire,

And rates my heart, and chides my thievish eye;

Who, being rich enough in seeing her,

Yet seeks elsewhere: and basest theft is that

Which cannot check itself on poverty.-

Now, boy, what news?

Prince. I have assembled, my dear lord and father,

The choicest buds of all our English blood,

For our affairs in France; and here we come

To take direction from your majesty.

Edward. Still do I see in him delineate

His mother's visage; those his eyes are hers,

Who, looking wistly {262a} on me, made me blush;

For faults against themselves give evidence:

Lust is a fire; and men, like lanterns, show

Light lust within themselves even through themselves.

Away, loose silks of wavering vanity!

Shall the large limit of fair Brittany {262b}

By me be overthrown? and shall I not

Master this little mansion of myself?

Give me an armour of eternal steel;

I go to conquer kings. And shall I then

Subdue myself, and be my enemy's friend?

It must not be.-Come, boy, forward, advance!

Let's with our colours sweep the air of France.

Here Lodowick announces the approach of the Countess "with a smiling cheer."

Edward. Why, there it goes! that very smile of hers

Hath ransomed captive France; and set the king,

The dauphin, and the peers, at liberty.-

Go, leave me, Ned, and revel with thy friends. [Exit PRINCE.

Thy mother is but black; and thou, like her,

Dost put into my mind how foul she is.

Go, fetch the countess hither in thy hand,

And let her chase away these winter clouds;

For she gives beauty both to heaven and earth. [Exit LODOWICK.

The sin is more, to hack and hew poor men,

Than to embrace in an unlawful bed

The register of all rarieties {263a}

Since leathern Adam till this youngest hour.

Re-enter LODOWICK with the COUNTESS.

Go, Lodowick, put thy hand into my purse,

Play, spend, give, riot, waste; do what thou wilt,

So thou wilt hence awhile, and leave me here. [Exit LODOWICK.

Having already, out of a desire and determination to do no possible injustice to the actual merits of this play in the eyes of any reader who might never have gone over the text on which I had to comment, exceeded in no small degree the limits I had intended to impose upon my task in the way of citation, I shall not give so full a transcript from the next and last scene between the Countess and the King.

Edward. Now, my soul's playfellow! art thou come

To speak the more than heavenly word of yea

To my objection in thy beauteous love?

(Again, this singular use of the word objection in the sense of offer or proposal has no parallel in the plays of Shakespeare.)

Countess. My father on his blessing hath commanded-

Edward. That thou shalt yield to me.

Countess. Ay, dear my liege, your due.

Edward. And that, my dearest love, can be no less

Than right for right, and render {263b} love for love.

Countess. Than wrong for wrong, and endless hate for hate.

But, sith I see your majesty so bent,

That my unwillingness, my husband's love,

Your high estate, nor no respect respected,

Can be my help, but that your mightiness

Will overbear and awe these dear regards,

I bind my discontent to my content,

And what I would not I'll compel I will;

Provided that yourself remove those lets

That stand between your highness' love and mine.

Edward. Name them, fair countess, and by heaven I will.

Countess. It is their lives that stand between our love

That I would have choked up, my sovereign.

Edward. Whose lives, my lady?

Countess. My thrice loving liege,

Your queen, and Salisbury my wedded husband;

Who living have that title in our love

That we can not bestow but by their death.

Edward. Thy opposition {264a} is beyond our law.

Countess. So is your desire: If the law {264b}

Can hinder you to execute the one,

Let it forbid you to attempt the other:

I cannot think you love me as you say

Unless you do make good what you have sworn.

Edward. No more: thy husband and the queen shall die.

Fairer thou art by far than Hero was;

Beardless Leander not so strong as I:

He swom an easy current for his love;

But I will, through a helly spout of blood, {264c}

Arrive that Sestos where my Hero lies.

Countess. Nay, you'll do more; you'll make the river too

With their heartbloods that keep our love asunder;

Of which my husband and your wife are twain.

Edward. Thy beauty makes them guilty of their death

And gives in evidence that they shall die;

Upon which verdict I their judge condemn them.

Countess. O perjured beauty! more corrupted judge!

When, to the great star-chamber o'er our heads,

The universal sessions calls to count

This packing evil, we both shall tremble for it.

Edward. What says my fair love? is she resolute?

Countess. Resolute to be dissolved: {266} and, therefore, this:

Keep but thy word, great king, and I am thine.

Stand where thou dost; I'll part a little from thee;

And see how I will yield me to thy hands.

Here by my side do hang my wedding knives;

Take thou the one, and with it kill thy queen,

And learn by me to find her where she lies;

And with the other I'll despatch my love,

Which now lies fast asleep within my heart:

When they are gone, then I'll consent to love.

Such genuinely good wine as this needs no bush. But from this point onwards I can find nothing especially commendable in the remainder of the scene except its brevity. The King of course abjures his purpose, and of course compares the Countess with Lucretia to the disadvantage of the Roman matron; summons his son, Warwick, and the attendant lords; appoints each man his post by sea or land; and starts for Flanders in a duly moral and military state of mind.

Here ends the first part of the play; and with it all possible indication, though never so shadowy, of the possible shadowy presence of Shakespeare. At the opening of the third act we are thrown among a wholly new set of characters and events, all utterly out of all harmony and keeping with all that has gone before. Edward alone survives as nominal protagonist; but this survival-assuredly not of the fittest-is merely the survival of the shadow of a name. Anything more pitifully crude and feeble, more helplessly inartistic and incomposite, than this process or pretence of juncture where there is no juncture, this infantine shifting and shuffling of the scenes and figures, it is impossible to find among the rudest and weakest attempts of the dawning or declining drama in its first or second childhood.

It is the less necessary to analyse at any length the three remaining acts of this play, that the work has already been done to my hand, and well done, by Charles Knight; who, though no professed critic or esoteric expert in Shakespearean letters, approved himself by dint of sheer honesty and conscience not unworthy of a considerate hearing. To his edition of Shakespeare I therefore refer all readers desirous of further excerpts than I care to give.

The first scene of the third act is a storehouse of contemporary commonplace. Nothing fresher than such stale pot-pourri as the following is to be gathered up in thin sprinklings from off the dry flat soil. A messenger informs the French king that he has descried off shore

The proud armado (sic) of King Edward's ships;

Which at the first, far off when I did ken,

Seemed as it were a grove of withered pines;

But, drawing on, their glorious bright aspect,

Their streaming ensigns wrought of coloured silk,

Like to a meadow full of sundry flowers,

Adorns the naked bosom of the earth;

and so on after the exactest and therefore feeblest fashion of the Pre-Marlowites; with equal regard, as may be seen, for grammar and for sense in the construction of his periods. The narrative of a sea-fight ensuing on this is pitiable beyond pity and contemptibly beneath contempt.

In the next scene we have a flying view of peasants in flight, with a description of five cities on fire not undeserving of its place in the play, immediately after the preceding sea-piece: but relieved by such wealth of pleasantry as marks the following jest, in which the most purblind eye will be the quickest to discover a touch of the genuine Shakespearean humour.

1st Frenchman. What, is it quarter-day, that you remove,

And carry bag and baggage too?

2nd Frenchman. Quarter-day? ay, and quartering-day, I fear.

Euge!

The scene of debate before Cressy is equally flat and futile, vulgar and verbose; yet in this Sham Shakespearean scene of our present poeticule's I have noted one genuine Shakespearean word, "solely singular for its singleness."

So may thy temples with Bellona's hand

Be still adorned with laurel victory!

In this notably inelegant expression of goodwill we find the same use of the word "laurel" as an adjective and epithet of victory which thus confronts us in the penultimate speech of the third scene in the first act of Antony and Cleopatra.

Upon your sword

Sit laurel victory, and smooth success

Be strewed before your feet!

There is something more (as less there could not be) of spirit and movement in the battle-scene where Edward refuses to send relief to his son, wishing the prince to win his spurs unaided, and earn the first-fruits of his fame single-handed against the heaviest odds; but the forcible feebleness of a minor poet's fancy shows itself amusingly in the mock stoicism and braggart philosophy of the King's reassuring reflection, "We have more sons than one."

In the first and third scenes of the fourth act we may concede some slight merit to the picture of a chivalrous emulation in magnanimity between the Duke of Burgundy and his former fellow-student, whose refusal to break his parole as a prisoner extorts from his friend the concession refused to his importunity as an envoy: but the execution is by no means worthy of the subject.

The limp loquacity of long-winded rhetoric, so natural to men and soldiers in an hour of emergency, which distinguishes the dialogue between the Black Prince and Audley on the verge of battle, is relieved by this one last touch of quasi-Shakespearean thought or style discoverable in the play of which I must presently take a short-and a long-farewell.

Death's name is much more mighty than his deeds:

Thy parcelling this power hath made it more.

As many sands as these my hands can hold

Are but my handful of so many sands;

Then all the world-and call it but a power-

Easily ta'en up, and {269} quickly thrown away;

But if I stand to count them sand by sand

The number would confound my memory

And make a thousand millions of a task

Which briefly is no more indeed than one.

These quartered squadrons and these regiments

Before, behind us, and on either hand,

Are but a power: When we name a man,

His hand, his foot, his head, have several strengths;

And being all but one self instant strength,

Why, all this many, Audley, is but one,

And we can call it all but one man's strength.

He that hath far to go tells it by miles;

If he should tell the steps, it kills his heart:

The drops are infinite that make a flood,

And yet, thou know'st, we call it but a rain.

There is but one France, one king of France, {270}

That France hath no more kings; and that same king

Hath but the puissant legion of one king;

And we have one: Then apprehend no odds;

For one to one is fair equality.

Bien coupé, mal cousu; such is the most favourable verdict I can pass on this voluminous effusion of a spirit smacking rather of the schools than of the field. The first six lines or so might pass muster as the early handiwork of Shakespeare; the rest has as little of his manner as his matter, his metre as his style.

The poet can hardly be said to rise again after this calamitous collapse. We find in the rest of this scene nothing better worth remark than such poor catches at a word as this;

And let those milkwhite messengers of time

Show thy time's learning in this dangerous time;

a villainous trick of verbiage which went nigh now and then to affect the adolescent style of Shakespeare, and which happens to find itself as admirably as unconsciously burlesqued in two lines of this very scene:

I will not give a penny for a life,

Nor half a halfpenny to shun grim death.

The verses intervening are smooth, simple, and passably well worded; indeed the force of elegant commonplace cannot well go further than in such lines as these.

Thyself art bruised and bent with many broils,

And stratagems forepast with iron pens

Are texèd {271} in thine honourable face;

Thou art a married man in this distress,

But danger woos me as a blushing maid;

Teach me an answer to this perilous time.

Audley. To die is all as common as to live;

The one in choice, the other holds in chase;

For from the instant we begin to live

We do pursue and hunt the time to die:

First bud we, then we blow, and after seed;

Then presently we fall; and as a shade

Follows the body, so we follow death.

If then we hunt for death, why do we fear it?

If we fear it, why do we follow it?

(Let me intimate a doubt in passing, whether Shakespeare would ever have put by the mouth of any but a farcical mask a query so provocative of response from an Irish echo-"Because we can't help.")

If we do fear, with fear we do but aid

The thing we fear to seize on us the sooner;

If we fear not, then no resolvèd proffer

Can overthrow the limit of our fate:

and so forth. Again the hastiest reader will have been reminded of a passage in the transcendant central scenes of Measure for Measure:

Merely, thou art death's fool;

For him thou labour'st by thy flight to shun,

And yet runn'st toward him still;

and hence also some may infer that this pitiful penny-whistle was blown by the same breath which in time gained power to fill that archangelic trumpet. Credat Zoilus Shakespearomastix, non ego.

The next scene is something better than passable, but demands no special analysis and affords no necessary extract. We may just observe as examples of style the play on words between the flight of hovering ravens and the flight of routed soldiers, and the description of the sudden fog

Which now hath hid the airy floor of heaven,

And made at noon a night unnatural

Upon the quaking and dismayèd world.

The interest rises again with the reappearance and release of Salisbury, and lifts the style for a moment to its own level. à tout seigneur tout honneur; the author deserves some dole of moderate approbation for his tribute to the national chivalry of a Frenchman as here exemplified in the person of Prince Charles.

Of the two next scenes, in which the battle of Poitiers is so inadequately "staged to the show," I can only say that if any reader believes them to be the possible work of the same hand which set before all men's eyes for all time the field of Agincourt, he will doubtless die in that belief, and go to his own place in the limbo of commentators.

But a yet more flagrant effect of contrast is thrust upon our notice at the opening of the fifth act. If in all the historical groundwork of this play there is one point of attraction which we might have thought certain to stimulate the utmost enterprise and evoke the utmost capacities of an aspiring dramatist, it must surely be sought in the crowning scene of the story; in the scene of Queen Philippa's intercession for the burgesses of Calais. We know how Shakespeare on the like occasion was wont to transmute into golden verse the silver speech supplied to him by North's version of Amyot's Plutarch. {273} With the text of Lord Berners before him, the author of King Edward III. has given us for the gold of Froissart not even adulterated copper, but unadulterated lead. Incredible as it may seem to readers of the historian, the poeticule has actually contrived so far to transfigure by dint of disfiguring him that this most noble and pathetic scene in all the annals of chivalry, when passed through the alembic of his incompetence, appears in a garb of transforming verse under a guise at once weak and wordy, coarse and unchivalrous. The whole scene is at all points alike in its unlikeness to the workmanship of Shakespeare.

Here then I think we may finally draw bridle: for the rest of the course is not worth running; there is nothing in the residue of this last act which deserves analysis or calls for commentary. We have now examined the whole main body of the work with somewhat more than necessary care; and our conclusion is simply this: that if any man of common reading, common modesty, common judgment, and common sense, can be found to maintain the theory of Shakespeare's possible partnership in the composition of this play, such a man will assuredly admit that the only discernible or imaginable touches of his hand are very slight, very few, and very early. For myself, I am and have always been perfectly satisfied with one single and simple piece of evidence that Shakespeare had not a finger in the concoction of King Edward III. He was the author of King Henry V.

NOTE.

I was not surprised to hear that my essay on the historical play of King Edward III. had on its first appearance met in various quarters with assailants of various kinds. There are some forms of attack to which no answer is possible for a man of any human self-respect but the lifelong silence of contemptuous disgust. To such as these I will never condescend to advert or to allude further than by the remark now as it were forced from me, that never once in my life have I had or will I have recourse in self-defence either to the blackguard's loaded bludgeon of personalities or to the dastard's sheathed dagger of disguise. I have reviled no man's person: I have outraged no man's privacy. When I have found myself misled either by imperfection of knowledge or of memory, or by too much confidence in a generally trustworthy guide, I have silently corrected the misquotation or readily repaired the error. To the successive and representative heroes of the undying Dunciad I have left and will always leave the foul use of their own foul weapons. I have spoken freely and fearlessly, and so shall on all occasions continue to speak, of what I find to be worthy of praise or dispraise, contempt or honour, in the public works and actions of men. Here ends and here has always ended in literary matters the proper province of a gentleman; beyond it, though sometimes intruded on in time past by trespassers of a nobler race, begins the proper province of a blackguard.

REPORT ON THE PROCEEDINGS ON THE FIRST ANNIVERSARY SESSION OF THE NEWEST SHAKESPEARE SOCIETY.

A paper was read by Mr. A. on the disputed authorship of A Midsummer Night's Dream. He was decidedly of opinion that this play was to be ascribed to George Chapman. He based this opinion principally on the ground of style. From its similarity of subject he had at first been disposed to assign it to Cyril Tourneur, author of The Revenger's Tragedy; and he had drawn up in support of this theory a series of parallel passages extracted from the speeches of Vindice in that drama and of Oberon in the present play. He pointed out however that the character of Puck could hardly have been the work of any English poet but the author of Bussy d'Ambois. There was here likewise that gravity and condensation of thought conveyed through the medium of the "full and heightened style" commended by Webster, and that preponderance of philosophic or political discourse over poetic interest and dramatic action for which the author in question had been justly censured.

Some of the audience appearing slightly startled by this remark (indeed it afterwards appeared that the Chairman had been on the point of asking the learned member whether he was not thinking rather of Love's Labour's Lost?), Mr. A. cited the well-known scene in which Oberon discourses with Puck on matters concerning Mary Stuart and Queen Elizabeth, instead of despatching him at once on his immediate errand. This was universally accepted as proof positive, and the reading concluded amid signs of unanimous assent, when

Mr. B. had nothing to urge against the argument they had just heard, but he must remind them that there was a more weighty kind of evidence than that adduced by Mr. A.; and to this he doubted not they would all defer. He could prove by a tabulated statement that the words "to" and "from" occurred on an average from seven to nine times in every play of Chapman; whereas in the play under consideration the word "to" occurred exactly twelve times and the word "from" precisely ten. He was therefore of opinion that the authorship should in all probability be assigned to Anthony Munday.

As nobody present could dispute this conclusion, Mr. C. proceeded to read the argument by which he proposed to establish the fact, hitherto unaccountably overlooked by all preceding commentators, that the character of Romeo was obviously designed as a satire on Lord Burghley. The first and perhaps the strongest evidence in favour of this proposition was the extreme difficulty, he might almost say the utter impossibility, of discovering a single point of likeness between the two characters. This would naturally be the first precaution taken by a poor player who designed to attack an all-powerful Minister. But more direct light was thrown upon the subject by a passage in which "that kind of fruit that maids call medlars when they laugh alone" is mentioned in connection with a wish of Romeo's regarding his mistress. This must evidently be taken to refer to some recent occasion on which the policy of Lord Burghley (possibly in the matter of the Anjou marriage) had been rebuked in private by the Maiden Queen, "his mistress," as meddling, laughable, and fruitless.

This discovery seemed to produce a great impression till the Chairman reminded the Society that the play in question was now generally ascribed to George Peele, {278} who was notoriously the solicitor of Lord Burghley's patronage and the recipient of his bounty. That this poet was the author of Romeo and Juliet could no longer be a matter of doubt, as he was confident they would all agree with him on hearing that a living poet of note had positively assured him of the fact; adding that he had always thought so when at school. The plaudits excited by this announcement had scarcely subsided, when the Chairman clenched the matter by observing that he rather thought the same opinion had ultimately been entertained by his own grandmother.

Mr. D. then read a paper on the authorship and the hidden meaning of two contemporary plays which, he must regretfully remark, were too obviously calculated to cast a most unfavourable and even sinister light on the moral character of the new Shakespeare; whose possibly suspicious readiness to attack the vices of others with a view to diverting attention from his own was signally exemplified in the well-known fact that, even while putting on a feint of respect and tenderness for his memory, he had exposed the profligate haunts and habits of Christopher Marlowe under the transparent pseudonym of Christopher Sly. To the first of these plays attention had long since been drawn by a person of whom it was only necessary to say that he had devoted a long life to the study and illustration of Shakespeare and his age, and had actually presumed to publish a well-known edition of the poet at a date previous to the establishment of the present Society. He (Mr. D.) was confident that not another syllable could be necessary to expose that person to the contempt of all present. He proceeded, however, with the kind encouragement of the Chairman, to indulge at that editor's expense in sundry personalities both "loose and humorous," which being totally unfit for publication here are reserved for a private issue of "Loose and Humorous Papers" to be edited, with a running marginal commentary or illustrative and explanatory version of the utmost possible fullness, {279} by the Founder and another member of the Society. To these it might possibly be undesirable for them to attract the notice of the outside world. Reverting therefore to his first subject from various references to the presumed private character, habits, gait, appearance, and bearing of the gentleman in question, Mr. D. observed that the ascription of a share in the Taming of the Shrew to William Haughton (hitherto supposed the author of a comedy called Englishmen for my Money) implied a doubly discreditable blunder. The real fact, as he would immediately prove, was not that Haughton was joint author with Shakespeare of the Taming of the Shrew, but that Shakespeare was joint author with Haughton of Englishmen for my Money. He would not enlarge on the obvious fact that Shakespeare, so notorious a plunderer of others, had actually been reduced to steal from his own poor store an image transplanted from the last scene of the third act of Romeo and Juliet into the last scene of the third act of Englishmen for my Money; where the well-known and pitiful phrase-"Night's candles are burnt out"-reappears in all its paltry vulgarity as follows;-"Night's candles burn obscure." Ample as was the proof here supplied, he would prefer to rely exclusively upon such further evidence as might be said to lie at once on the surface and in a nutshell.

The second title of this play, by which the first title was in a few years totally superseded, ran thus: A Woman will have her Will. Now even in an age of punning titles such as that of a well-known and delightful treatise by Sir John Harrington, the peculiar fondness of Shakespeare for puns was notorious; but especially for puns on names, as in the proverbial case of Sir Thomas Lucy; and above all for puns on his own Christian name, as in his 135th, 136th, and 143rd sonnets. It must now be but too evident to the meanest intelligence-to the meanest intelligence, he repeated; for to such only did he or would he then and there or ever or anywhere address himself-(loud applause) that the graceless author, more utterly lost to all sense of shame than any Don Juan or other typical libertine of fiction, had come forward to placard by way of self-advertisement on his own stage, and before the very eyes of a Maiden Queen, the scandalous confidence in his own powers of fascination and seduction so cynically expressed in the too easily intelligible vaunt-A Woman will have her Will [Shakespeare]. In the penultimate line of the hundred and forty-third sonnet the very phrase might be said to occur:

So will I pray that thou mayst have thy Will.

Having thus established his case in the first instance to the satisfaction, as he trusted, not only of the present Society, but of any asylum for incurables in any part of the country, the learned member now passed on to the consideration of the allusions at once to Shakespeare and to a celebrated fellow-countryman, fellow-poet, and personal friend of his-Michael Drayton-contained in a play which had been doubtfully attributed to Shakespeare himself by such absurd idiots as looked rather to the poetical and dramatic quality of a poem or a play than to such tests as those to which alone any member of that Society would ever dream of appealing. What these were he need not specify; it was enough to say in recommendation of them that they had rather less to do with any question of dramatic or other poetry than with the differential calculus or the squaring of the circle. It followed that only the most perversely ignorant and ?sthetically presumptuous of readers could imagine the possibility of Shakespeare's concern or partnership in a play which had no more Shakespearean quality about it than mere poetry, mere passion, mere pathos, mere beauty and vigour of thought and language, mere command of dramatic effect, mere depth and subtlety of power to read, interpret, and reproduce the secrets of the heart and spirit. Could any further evidence be required of the unfitness and unworthiness to hold or to utter any opinion on the matter in hand which had consistently been displayed by the poor creatures to whom he had just referred, it would be found, as he felt sure the Founder and all worthy members of their Society would be the first to admit, in the despicable diffidence, the pitiful modesty, the contemptible deficiency in common assurance, with which the suggestion of Shakespeare's partnership in this play had generally been put forward and backed up. The tragedy of Arden of Feversham was indeed connected with Shakespeare-and that, as he should proceed to show, only too intimately; but Shakespeare was not connected with it-that is, in the capacity of its author. In what capacity would be but too evident when he mentioned the names of the two leading ruffians concerned in the murder of the principal character-Black Will and Shakebag. The single original of these two characters he need scarcely pause to point out. It would be observed that a double precaution had been taken against any charge of libel or personal attack which might be brought against the author and supported by the all-powerful court influence of Shakespeare's two principal patrons, the Earls of Essex and Southampton. Two figures were substituted for one, and the unmistakable name of Will Shakebag was cut in half and divided between them. Care had moreover been taken to disguise the person by altering the complexion of the individual aimed at. That the actual Shakespeare was a fair man they had the evidence of the coloured bust at Stratford. Could any capable and fair-minded man-he would appeal to their justly honoured Founder-require further evidence as to the original of Black Will Shakebag? Another important character in the play was Black Will's accomplice and Arden's servant-Michael, after whom the play had also at one time been called Murderous Michael. The single fact that Shakespeare and Drayton were both of them Warwickshire men would suffice, he could not doubt, to carry conviction with it to the mind of every member present, with regard to the original of this personage. It now only remained for him to produce the name of the real author of this play. He would do so at once-Ben Jonson. About the time of its production Jonson was notoriously engaged in writing those additions to the Spanish Tragedy of which a preposterous attempt had been made to deprive him on the paltry ground that the style (forsooth) of these additional scenes was very like the style of Shakespeare and utterly unlike the style of Jonson. To dispose for ever of this pitiful argument it would be sufficient to mention the names of its two first and principal supporters-Charles Lamb and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (hisses and laughter). Now, in these "adycions to Jeronymo" a painter was introduced complaining of the murder of his son. In the play before them a painter was introduced as an accomplice in the murder of Arden. It was unnecessary to dwell upon so trivial a point of difference as that between the stage employment or the moral character of the one artist and the other. In either case they were as closely as possible connected with a murder. There was a painter in the Spanish Tragedy, and there was also a painter in Arden of Feversham. He need not-he would not add another word in confirmation of the now established fact, that Ben Jonson had in this play held up to perpetual infamy-whether deserved or undeserved he would not pretend to say-the names of two poets who afterwards became his friends, but whom he had previously gibbeted or at least pilloried in public as Black Will Shakespeare and Murderous Michael Drayton.

Mr. E. then brought forward a subject of singular interest and importance-"The lameness of Shakespeare-was it moral or physical?" He would not insult their intelligence by dwelling on the absurd and exploded hypothesis that this expression was allegorical, but would at once assume that the infirmity in question was physical. Then arose the question-In which leg? He was prepared, on the evidence of an early play, to prove to demonstration that the injured and interesting limb was the left. "This shoe is my father," says Launce in the Two Gentlemen of Verona; "no, this left shoe is my father; no, no, this left shoe is my mother; nay, that cannot be so neither; yes, it is so, it is so; it hath the worser sole." This passage was not necessary either to the progress of the play or to the development of the character; he believed he was justified in asserting that it was not borrowed from the original novel on which the play was founded; the inference was obvious, that without some personal allusion it must have been as unintelligib1e to the audience as it had hitherto been to the commentators. His conjecture was confirmed, and the whole subject illustrated with a new light, by the well-known line in one of the Sonnets, in which the poet describes himself as "made lame by Fortune's dearest spite": a line of which the inner meaning and personal application had also by a remarkable chance been reserved for him (Mr. E.) to discover. There could be no doubt that we had here a clue to the origin of the physical infirmity referred to; an accident which must have befallen Shakespeare in early life while acting at the Fortune theatre, and consequently before his connection with a rival company; a fact of grave importance till now unverified. The epithet "dearest," like so much else in the Sonnets, was evidently susceptible of a double interpretation. The first and most natural explanation of the term would at once suggest itself; the playhouse would of necessity be dearest to the actor dependent on it for subsistence, as the means of getting his bread; but he thought it not unreasonable to infer from this unmistakable allusion that the entrance fee charged at the Fortune may probably have been higher than the price of seats in any other house. Whether or not this fact, taken in conjunction with the accident already mentioned, should be assumed as the immediate cause of Shakespeare's subsequent change of service, he was not prepared to pronounce with such positive confidence as they might naturally expect from a member of the Society; but he would take upon himself to affirm that his main thesis was now and for ever established on the most irrefragable evidence, and that no assailant could by any possibility dislodge by so much as a hair's breadth the least fragment of a single brick in the impregnable structure of proof raised by the argument to which they had just listened.

This demonstration being thus satisfactorily concluded, Mr. F. proceeded to read his paper on the date of Othello, and on the various parts of that play respectively assignable to Samuel Rowley, to George Wilkins, and to Robert Daborne. It was evident that the story of Othello and Desdemona was originally quite distinct from that part of the play in which Iago was a leading figure. This he was prepared to show at some length by means of the weak-ending test, the light-ending test, the double-ending test, the triple-ending test, the heavy-monosyllabic-eleventh-syllable-of-the-double-ending test, the run-on-line test, and the central-pause test. Of the partnership of other poets in the play he was able to adduce a simpler but not less cogent proof. A member of their Committee said to an objector lately: "To me, there are the handwritings of four different men, the thoughts and powers of four different men, in the play. If you can't see them now, you must wait till, by study, you can. I can't give you eyes." To this argument he (Mr. F.) felt that it would be an insult to their understandings if he should attempt to add another word. Still, for those who were willing to try and learn, and educate their ears and eyes, he had prepared six tabulated statements-

(At this important point of a most interesting paper, our reporter unhappily became unconscious, and remained for some considerable period in a state of deathlike stupor. On recovering from this total and unaccountable suspension of all his faculties, he found the speaker drawing gradually near the end of his figures, and so far succeeded in shaking off the sense of coma as to be able to resume his notes.)

That the first and fourth scenes of the third act were not by the same hand as the third scene he should have no difficulty in proving to the satisfaction of all capable and fair-minded men. In the first and fourth scenes the word "virtuous" was used as a dissyllable; in the third it was used as a trisyllable.

"Is, that she will to virtuous Desdemona." iii. 1.

"Where virtue is, these are more virtuous." iii. 3.

"That by your virtuous means I may again." iii. 4.

In the third scene he would also point out the great number of triple endings which had originally led the able editor of Euclid's Elements of Geometry to attribute the authorship of this scene to Shirley: Cassio (twice), patience, Cassio (again), discretion, Cassio (again), honesty, Cassio (again), jealousy, jealous (used as a trisyllable in the verse of Shakespeare's time), company (two consecutive lines with the triple ending), Cassio (again), conscience, petition, ability, importunity, conversation, marriage, dungeon, mandragora, passion, monstrous, conclusion, bounteous. He could not imagine any man in his senses questioning the weight of this evidence. Now, let them take the rhymed speeches of the Duke and Brabantio in Act i. Sc. 3, and compare them with the speech of Othello in Act iv. Sc. 2,

Had it pleased heaven

To try me with affliction.

He appealed to any expert whether this was not in Shakespeare's easy fourth budding manner, with, too, various other points already touched on. On the other hand, take the opening of Brabantio's speech-

So let the Turk of Cyprus us beguile;

We lose it not so long as we can smile.

That, he said, was in Shakespeare's difficult second flowering manner-the style of the later part of the earlier stage of Shakespeare's rhetorical first period but one. It was no more possible to move the one passage up to the date of the other than to invert the order of the alphabet. Here, then, putting aside for the moment the part of the play supplied by Shakespeare's assistants in the last three acts-miserably weak some of it was-they were able to disentangle the early love-play from the latter work in which Iago was principally concerned. There was at least fifteen years' growth between them, the steps of which could he traced in the poet's intermediate plays by any one who chose to work carefully enough at them. Set any of the speeches addressed in the Shakespeare part of the last act by Othello to Desdemona beside the consolatory address of the Duke to Brabantio, and see the difference of the rhetoric and style in the two. If they turned to characters, Othello and Desdemona were even more clearly the companion pair to Biron and Rosaline of Love's Labour's Lost than were Falstaff and Doll Tearsheet the match-pair (sic) of Romeo and Juliet. In Love's Labour's Lost the question of complexion was identical, though the parts were reversed. He would cite but a few parallel passages in evidence of this relationship between the subjects of the two plays.

Love's Labour's Lost, iv. 3. Othello.

1. "By heaven, thy love is black 1. "An old black ram." i. 1.

as ebony."

2. "No face is fair that is not 2. "Your son-in-law is far more

full so black." fair than black." i. 3.

3. "O paradox! Black is the 3. "How if she be black and

badge of hell." witty?" ii. 1.

4. "O, if in black my lady's 4. "If she be black, and thereto

brows be decked." have a wit." id.

5. "And therefore is she born 5. "A measure to the health of

to make black fair." black Othello." ii. 3.

6. "Paints itself black to 6. "For I am black." iii, 3.

imitate her brow."

7. "To look like her are 7. "Begrimed and black." id.

chimney-sweepers black."

Now, with these parallel passages before them, what man, woman, or child could bring himself or herself to believe that the connection of these plays was casual or the date of the first Othello removable from the date of the early contemporary late-first-period-but-one play Love's Labour's Lost, or that anybody's opinion that they were so was worth one straw? When therefore by the introduction of the Iago episode Shakespeare in his later days had with the assistance of three fellow-poets completed the unfinished work of his youth, the junction thus effected of the Brabantio part of the play with this Iago underplot supplied them with an evidence wholly distinct from that of the metrical test which yet confirmed in every point the conclusion independently arrived at and supported by the irresistible coincidence of all the tests. He defied anybody to accept his principle of study or adopt his method of work, and arrive at a different conclusion from himself.

The reading of Mr. G.'s paper on the authorship of the soliloquies in Hamlet was unavoidably postponed till the next meeting, the learned member having only time on this occasion to give a brief summary of the points he was prepared to establish and the grounds on which he was prepared to establish them. A year or two since, when he first thought of starting the present Society, he had never read a line of the play in question, having always understood it to be admittedly spurious: but on being assured of the contrary by one of the two foremost poets of the English-speaking world, who was good enough to read out to him in proof of this assertion all that part of the play which could reasonably be assigned to Shakespeare, he had of course at once surrendered his own former opinion, well grounded as it had hitherto seemed to be on the most solid of all possible foundations. At their next meeting he would show cause for attributing to Ben Jonson not only the soliloquies usually but inconsiderately quoted as Shakespeare's, but the entire original conception of the character of the Prince of Denmark. The resemblance of this character to that of Volpone in The Fox and to that of Face in The Alchemist could not possibly escape the notice of the most cursory reader. The principle of disguise was the same in each case, whether the end in view were simply personal profit, or (as in the case of Hamlet) personal profit combined with revenge; and whether the disguise assumed was that of madness, of sickness, or of a foreign personality, the assumption of character was in all three cases identical. As to style, he was only too anxious to meet (and, he doubted not, to beat) on his own ground any antagonist whose ear had begotten {291} the crude and untenable theory that the Hamlet soliloquies were not distinctly within the range of the man who could produce those of Crites and of Macilente in Cynthia's Revels and Every Man out of his Humour. The author of those soliloquies could, and did, in the parallel passages of Hamlet, rise near the height of the master he honoured and loved.

The further discussion of this subject was reserved for the next meeting of the Society, as was also the reading of Mr. H.'s paper on the subsequent quarrel between the two joint authors of Hamlet, which led to Jonson's caricature of Shakespeare (then retired from London society to a country life of solitude) under the name of Morose, and to Shakespeare's retort on Jonson, who was no less evidently attacked under the designation of Ariel. The allusions to the subject of Shakespeare's sonnets in the courtship and marriage of Epic?ne by Morose were as obvious as the allusions in the part of Ariel to the repeated incarceration of Jonson, first on a criminal and secondly on a political charge, and to his probable release in the former case (during the reign of Elizabeth=Sycorax) at the intercession of Shakespeare, who was allowed on all hands to have represented himself in the character of Prospero ("it was mine art that let thee out"). Mr. I. would afterwards read a paper on the evidence for Shakespeare's whole or part authorship of a dozen or so of the least known plays of his time, which, besides having various words and phrases in common with his acknowledged works, were obviously too bad to be attributed to any other known writer of the period. Eminent among these was the tragedy of Andromana, or the Merchant's Wife, long since rejected from the list of Shirley's works as unworthy of that poet's hand. Unquestionably it was so; not less unworthy than A Larum for London of Marlowe's. The consequent inference that it must needs be the work of the new Shakespeare's was surely no less cogent in this than in the former case. The allusion occurring in it to a play bearing date just twenty-six years after the death of Shakespeare, and written by a poet then unborn, was a strong point in favour of his theory. (This argument was received with general marks of adhesion.) What, he would ask, could be more natural than that Shirley when engaged on the revision and arrangement for the stage of this posthumous work of the new Shakespeare's (a fact which could require no further proof than he had already adduced), should have inserted this reference in order to disguise the name of its real author, and protect it from the disfavour of an audience with whom that name was notoriously out of fashion? This reasoning, conclusive in itself, became even more irresistible-or would become so, if that were anything less than an absolute impossibility-on comparison of parallel passages,

Though kings still hug suspicion in their bosoms,

They hate the causer. (Andromana, Act i. Sc. 3.)

Compare this with the avowal put by Shakespeare into the mouth of a king.

Though I did wish him dead

I hate the murderer. (King Richard II., Act v. Sc. 6.)

Again in the same scene:

For then her husband comes home from the Rialto.

Compare this with various passages (too familiar to quote) in the Merchant of Venice. The transference of the Rialto to Iberia was of a piece with the discovery of a sea-coast in Bohemia. In the same scene Andromana says to her lover, finding him reluctant to take his leave, almost in the very words of Romeo to Juliet,

Then let us stand and outface danger,

Since you will have it so.

It was obvious that only the author of the one passage could have thought it necessary to disguise his plagiarism in the other by an inversion of sexes between the two speakers. In the same scene were three other indisputable instances of repetition.

Mariners might with far greater ease

Hear whole shoals of sirens singing.

Compare Comedy of Errors, Act iii. Scene 2.

Sing, siren, for thyself.

In this case identity of sex was as palpable an evidence for identity of authorship as diversity of sex had afforded in the preceding instance.

Again:

Have oaths no more validity with princes?

In Romeo and Juliet, Act iii. Scene 3, the very same words were coupled in the very same order:

More validity,

More honourable state, more courtship lies

In carrion flies than Romeo.

Again:

It would have killed a salamander.

Compare the First Part of King Henry IV, Act iii. Scene 3.

I have maintained that salamander of yours with fire any time this two and thirty years.

In Act ii. Scene 2 the hero, on being informed how heavy are the odds against him in the field, answers,

I am glad on't; the honour is the greater.

To which his confidant rejoins:

The danger is the greater.

And in the sixth scene of the same act the messenger observes:

I only heard the prince wish

. . . . . . .

He had fewer by a thousand men.

Could any member doubt that we had here the same hand which gave us the like debate between King Henry and Westmoreland on the eve of Agincourt? or could any member suppose that in the subsequent remark of the same military confidant, "I smell a rat, sir," there was merely a fortuitous coincidence with Hamlet's reflection as he "whips out his rapier"-in itself a martial proceeding-under similar circumstances to the same effect?

In the very next scene a captain observes of his own troops

Methinks such tattered rogues should never conquer:

a touch that could only be due to the pencil which had drawn Falstaff's ragged regiment. In both cases, moreover, it was to be noted that the tattered rogues proved ultimately victorious. But he had-they might hardly believe it, but so it was-even yet stronger and more convincing evidence to offer. It would be remembered that a play called The Double Falsehood, formerly attributed to Shakespeare on the authority of Theobald, was now generally supposed to have been in its original form the work of Shirley. What, then, he would ask, could be more natural or more probable than that a play formerly ascribed to Shirley should prove to be the genuine work of Shakespeare? Common sense, common reason, common logic, all alike and all equally combined to enforce upon every candid judgment this inevitable conclusion. This, however, was nothing in comparison to the final proof which he had yet to lay before them. He need not remind them that in the opinion of their illustrious German teachers, the first men to discover and reveal to his unworthy countrymen the very existence of the new Shakespeare, the authenticity of any play ascribed to the possibly too prolific pen of that poet was invariably to be determined in the last resort by consideration of its demerits. No English critic, therefore, who felt himself worthy to have been born a German, would venture to question the postulate on which all sound principles of criticism with regard to this subject must infallibly be founded: that, given any play of unknown or doubtful authorship, the worse it was, the likelier was it to be Shakespeare's. (This proposition was received with every sign of unanimous assent.) Now, on this ground he was prepared to maintain that the claims of Andromana to their most respectful, their most cordial, their most unhesitating acceptance were absolutely beyond all possibility of parallel. Not Mucedorus or Fair Em, not The Birth of Merlin or Thomas Lord Cromwell, could reasonably or fairly be regarded as on the same level of worthlessness with this incomparable production. No mortal man who had survived its perusal could for a moment hesitate to agree that it was the most incredibly, ineffably, inconceivably, unmitigatedly, irredeemably, inexpressibly damnable piece of bad work ever perpetrated by human hand. No mortal critic of the genuine Anglo-German school could therefore hesitate for a moment to agree that in common consistency he was bound to accept it as the possible work of no human hand but the hand of the New Shakespeare.

The Chairman then proceeded to recapitulate the work done and the benefits conferred by the Society during the twelve months which had elapsed since its foundation on that day (April 1st) last year. They had ample reason to congratulate themselves and him on the result. They had established an entirely new kind of criticism, working by entirely new means towards an entirely new end, in honour of an entirely new kind of Shakespeare. They had proved to demonstration and overwhelmed with obloquy the incompetence, the imbecility, the untrustworthiness, the blunders, the forgeries, the inaccuracies, the obliquities, the utter moral and literary worthlessness, of previous students and societies. They had revealed to the world at large the generally prevalent ignorance of Shakespeare and his works which so discreditably distinguished his countrymen. This they had been enabled to do by the simple process of putting forward various theories, and still more various facts, but all of equally incontrovertible value and relevance, of which no Englishman-he might say, no mortal-outside the Society had ever heard or dreamed till now. They had discovered the one trustworthy and indisputable method, so easy and so simple that it must now seem wonderful it should never have been discovered before, by which to pluck out the heart of the poet's mystery and detect the secret of his touch; the study of Shakespeare by rule of thumb. Every man, woman, and child born with five fingers on each hand was henceforward better qualified as a critic than any poet or scholar of time past. But it was not, whatever outsiders might pretend to think, exclusively on the verse-test, as it had facetiously been called on account of its total incompatibility with any conceivable scheme of metre or principle of rhythm-it was not exclusively on this precious and unanswerable test that they relied. Within the Society as well as without, the pretensions of those who would acknowledge no other means of deciding on debated questions had been refuted and repelled. What were the other means of investigation and verification in which not less than in the metrical test they were accustomed to put their faith, and by which they doubted not to attain in the future even more remarkable results than their researches had as yet achieved, the debate just concluded, in common with every other for which they ever had met or ever were likely to meet, would amply suffice to show. By such processes as had been applied on this as on all occasions to the text of Shakespeare's works and the traditions of his life, they trusted in a very few years to subvert all theories which had hitherto been held and extirpate all ideas which had hitherto been cherished on the subject: and having thus cleared the ground for his advent, to discover for the admiration of the world, as the name of their Society implied, a New Shakespeare. The first step towards this end must of course be the demolition of the old one; and he would venture to say they had already made a good beginning in that direction. They had disproved or they would disprove the claim of Shakespeare to the sole authorship of Macbeth, Julius C?sar, King Lear, Hamlet, and Othello; they had established or they would establish the fact of his partnership in Locrine, Mucedorus, The Birth of Merlin, Dr. Dodipoll, and Sir Giles Goosecap. They had with them the incomparable critics of Germany; men whose knowledge and judgment on all questions of English literature were as far beyond the reach of their English followers as the freedom and enlightenment enjoyed by the subjects of a military empire were beyond the reach of the citizens of a democratic republic. They had established and affiliated to their own primitive body or church various branch societies or sects, in England and elsewhere, devoted to the pursuit of the same end by the same means and method of study as had just been exemplified in the transactions of the present meeting. Still there remained much to be done; in witness of which he proposed to lay before them at their next meeting, by way of inauguration under a happy omen of their new year's work, the complete body of evidence by means of which he was prepared to demonstrate that some considerable portion, if not the greater part, of the remaining plays hitherto assigned to Shakespeare was due to the collaboration of a contemporary actor and playwright, well known by name, but hitherto insufficiently appreciated; Robert Armin, the author of A Nest of Ninnies.

ADDITIONS AND CORRECTIONS.

The humble but hard-working journeyman of letters who was charged with the honourable duty of reporting the transactions at the last meeting of the Newest Shakespeare Society on the auspicious occasion of its first anniversary, April 1st, has received sundry more or less voluminous communications from various gentlemen whose papers were then read or announced, pointing out with more or less acrimonious commentary the matters on which it seems to them severally that they have cause to complain of imperfection or inaccuracy in his conscientious and painstaking report. Anxious above all things to secure for himself such credit as may be due to the modest merit of scrupulous fidelity, he desires to lay before the public so much of the corrections conveyed in their respective letters of reclamation as may be necessary to complete or to rectify the first draught of their propositions as conveyed in his former summary. On the present occasion, however, he must confine himself to forwarding the rectifications supplied by two of the members who took a leading part in the debate of April 1st.

The necessarily condensed report of Mr. A.'s paper on A Midsummer Night's Dream may make the reasoning put forward by that gentleman liable to the misconception of a hasty reader. The omission of various qualifying phrases has left his argument without such explanation, his statements without such reservation, as he had been careful to supply. He did not say in so many words that he had been disposed to assign this drama to the author of The Revenger's Tragedy simply on the score of the affinity discernible between the subjects of the two plays. He is not prone to self-confidence or to indulgence in paradox. What he did say was undeniable by any but those who trusted only to their ear, and refused to correct the conclusions thus arrived at by the help of other organs which God had given them-their fingers, for example, and their toes; by means of which a critic of trained and competent scholarship might with the utmost confidence count up as far as twenty, to the great profit of all students who were willing to accept his guidance and be bound by his decision on matters of art and poetry. Only the most purblind could fail to observe, what only the most perverse could hesitate to admit, that there was at first sight an obvious connection between the poison-flower-"purple from love's wound"-squeezed by Oberon into the eyes of the sleeping Titania and the poison rubbed by Vindice upon the skull of the murdered Gloriana. No student of Ulrici's invaluable work would think this a far-fetched reference. That eminent critic had verified the meaning and detected the allusion underlying many a passage of Shakespeare in which the connection of moral idea was more difficult to establish than this. In the fifth act of either play there was a masque or dramatic show of a sanguinary kind; in the one case the bloodshed was turned to merry-making, in the other the merry-making was turned to bloodshed. Oberon's phrase, "till I torment thee for this injury," might easily be mistaken for a quotation from the part of Vindice. This explanation, he trusted, would suffice to exonerate his original view from any charge of haste or rashness; especially as he had now completely given it up, and adopted one (if possible) more impregnably based on internal and external evidence.

Mr. C. was not unnaturally surprised and indignant to find his position as to Romeo and Lord Burghley barely indicated, and the notice given of the arguments by which it was supported so docked and curtailed as to convey a most inadequate conception of their force. Among the chief points of his argument were these: that the forsaken Rosaline was evidently intended for the late Queen Mary, during whose reign Cecil had notoriously conformed to the observances of her creed, though ready on the accession of Elizabeth to throw it overboard at a day's notice; (it was not to be overlooked that the friar on first hearing the announcement of this change of faith is made earnestly to remonstrate, prefacing his reproaches with an invocation of two sacred names-an invocation peculiar to Catholics;) that the resemblance between old Capulet and Henry VIII. is obvious to the most careless reader; his oath of "God's bread!" immediately followed by the avowal "it makes me mad" is an unmistakable allusion to the passions excited by the eucharistic controversy; his violence towards Juliet at the end of the third act at once suggests the alienation of her father's heart from the daughter of Anne Boleyn; the self-congratulation on her own "stainless" condition as a virgin expressed by Juliet in soliloquy (Act iii. Sc. 2) while in the act of awaiting her bridegroom conveys a furtive stroke of satire at the similar vaunt of Elizabeth when likewise meditating marriage and preparing to receive a suitor from the hostile house of Valois. It must be unnecessary to point out the resemblance or rather the identity between the character and fortune of Paris and the character and fortune of Essex, whose fate had been foreseen and whose end prefigured by the poet with almost prophetic sagacity. To the far-reaching eye of Shakespeare it must have seemed natural and inevitable that Paris (Essex) should fall by the hand of Romeo (Burghley) immediately before the monument of the Capulets where their common mistress was interred alive-immediately, that is, before the termination of the Tudor dynasty in the person of Elizabeth, who towards the close of her reign may fitly have been regarded as one already buried with her fathers, though yet living in a state of suspended animation under the influence of a deadly narcotic potion administered by the friends of Romeo-by the partisans, that is, of the Cecilian policy. The Nurse was not less evidently designed to represent the Established Church. Allusions to the marriage of the clergy are profusely scattered through her speeches. Her deceased husband was probably meant for Sir Thomas More-"a merry man" to the last moment of his existence-who might well be supposed by a slight poetic license to have foreseen in the infancy of Elizabeth her future backsliding and fall from the straight path "when she came to age." The passing expression of tenderness with which the Nurse refers to his memory-"God be with his soul!"-implies at once the respect in which the name of the martyr Chancellor was still generally held, and the lingering remains of Catholic tradition which still made a prayer for the dead rise naturally to Anglican lips. On the other hand, the strife between Anglicans and Puritans, the struggle of episcopalian with Calvinistic reformers, was quite as plainly typified in the quarrel between the Nurse and Mercutio, in which the Martin Marprelate controversy was first unmistakably represented on the stage. The "saucy merchant, that was so full of his ropery," with his ridicule of the "stale" practice of Lenten fasting and abstinence, his contempt for "a Lenten pie," and his preference for a flesh diet as "very good meat in Lent," is clearly a disciple of Calvin; and the impotence of the Nurse, however scandalised at the nakedness of his ribald profanity, to protect herself against it by appeal to reason or tradition, is dwelt upon with an emphasis sufficient to indicate the secret tendency of the poet's own sympathies and convictions. In Romeo's attempt at conciliation, and his poor excuse for Mercutio (which yet the Nurse, an emblem of the temporising and accommodating pliancy of episcopalian Protestantism, shows herself only too ready to accept as valid) as "one that God hath made, for himself to mar,"-the allusion here is evidently to the democratic and revolutionary tendencies of the doctrine of Knox and Calvin, with its ultimate developments of individualism and private judgment-we recognise the note of Burghley's lifelong policy and its endeavour to fuse the Protestant or Puritan party with the state Church of the Tudors as by law established. The distaste of Elizabeth's bishops for such advances, their flutter of apprehension at the daring and their burst of indignation at the insolence of the Calvinists, are significantly expressed in terms which seem to hint at a possible return for help and protection to the shelter of the older faith and the support of its partisans. "An 'a speak anything against me, I'll take him down an 'a were lustier than he is, and twenty such Jacks;" (the allusion here is again obvious, to the baptismal name of John Calvin and John Knox, if not also to the popular byword of Jack Presbyter;) "and if I cannot," (here the sense of insecurity and dependence on foreign help or secular power becomes transparent) "I'll find those that shall." She disclaims communion with the Protestant Churches of the continent, with Amsterdam or Geneva: "I am none of his flirt-gills; I am none of his skains-mates." Peter, who carries her fan ("to hide her face: for her fan's the fairer face"; we may take this to be a symbol of the form of episcopal consecration still retained in the Anglican Church as a cover for its separation from Catholicism), is undoubtedly meant for Whitgift, Archbishop of Canterbury; the name Peter, as applied to a menial who will stand by and suffer every knave to use the Church at his pleasure, but is ready to draw as soon as another man if only he may be sure of having the secular arm of the law on his side, implies a bitter sarcasm on the intruding official of state then established by law as occupant of a see divorced from its connection with that of the apostle. The sense of instability natural to an institution which is compelled to rely for support on ministers who are themselves dependent on the state whose pay they draw for power to strike a blow in self-defence could hardly be better expressed than by the solemn and piteous, almost agonised asseveration; "Now, afore God, I am so vexed, that every part about me quivers." To Shakespeare, it cannot be doubted, the impending dissolution or dislocation of the Anglican system in "every part" by civil war and religious discord must even then have been but too ominously evident.

If further confirmation could be needed of the underlying significance of allusion traceable throughout this play, it might amply be supplied by fresh reference to the first scene in which the Nurse makes her appearance on the stage, and is checked by Lady Capulet in the full tide of affectionate regret for her lost husband. We can well imagine Anne Boleyn cutting short the regrets of some indiscreet courtier for Sir Thomas More in the very words of the text;

Enough of this; I pray thee, hold thy peace.

The "parlous knock" which left so big a lump upon the brow of the infant Juliet is evidently an allusion to the declaration of Elizabeth's illegitimacy while yet in her cradle. The seal of bastardy set upon the baby brow of

Anne Boleyn's daughter may well be said to have "broken" it.

The counsel of the Nurse to Juliet in Act iii. Scene 5 to forsake Romeo for Paris indicates the bias of the hierarchy in favour of Essex-"a lovely gentleman"-rather than of the ultra-Protestant policy of Burghley, who doubtless in the eyes of courtiers and churchmen was "a dish-clout to him."

These were a few of the points, set down at random, which he had been enabled to verify within the limits of a single play. They would suffice to give an idea of the process by which, when applied in detail to every one of Shakespeare's plays, he trusted to establish the secret history and import of each, not less than the general sequence and significance of all. Further instalments of this work would probably be issued in the forthcoming or future Transactions of the Newest Shakespeare Society; and it was confidently expected that the final monument of his research when thoroughly completed and illustrated by copious appendices, would prove as worthy as any work of mere English scholarship could hope to be of a place beside the inestimable commentaries of Gervinus, Ulrici, and the Polypseudocriticopantodapomorosophisticometricoglossematographicomaniacal Company for the Confusion of Shakespeare and Diffusion of Verbiage (Unlimited).

CHIM?RA BOMBINANS IN VACUO.

NOTE.

Mindful of the good old apologue regarding "the squeak of the real pig," I think it here worth while to certify the reader of little faith, that the more incredibly impudent absurdities above cited are not so much or so often the freaks of parody or the fancies of burlesque as select excerpts and transcripts of printed and published utterances from the "pink soft litter" of a living brood-from the reports of an actual Society, issued in an abridged and doubtless an emasculated form through the columns of a weekly newspaper. One final and unapproachable instance, one transcendant and pyramidal example of classical taste and of critical scholarship, I did not venture to impair by transference from those columns and transplantation into these pages among humbler specimens of minor monstrosity. Let it stand here once more on record as "a good jest for ever"-or rather as the best and therefore as the worst, as the worst and therefore as the best, of all possible bad jests ever to be cracked between this and the crack of doom. Sophocles, said a learned member, was the proper parallel to Shakespeare among the ancient tragedians: ?schylus-hear, O heaven, and give ear, O earth!-?schylus was only a Marlowe.

The hand which here transcribes this most transcendant utterance has written before now many lines in verse and in prose to the honour and glory of Christopher Marlowe: it has never-be the humble avowal thus blushingly recorded-it has never set down as the writer's opinion that he was only an ?schylus. In other words, it has never registered as my deliberate and judicial verdict the finding that he was only the equal of the greatest among all tragic and all prophetic poets; of the man who combined all the light of the Greeks with all the fire of the Hebrews; who varied at his will the revelation of the single gift of Isaiah with the display of the mightiest among the manifold gifts of Shakespeare.

Footnotes.

{30} Reprinted by Dr. Grosart in his beautiful and valuable edition of Greene's works.

{33} One thing is certain: that damnable last scene at which the gorge rises even to remember it is in execution as unlike the crudest phase of Shakespeare's style as in conception it is unlike the idlest birth of his spirit. Let us hope that so foul a thing could not have been done in even tolerably good verse.

{42} It is not the least of Lord Macaulay's offences against art that he should have contributed the temporary weight of his influence as a critic to the support of so ignorant and absurd a tradition of criticism as that which classes the great writer here mentioned with the brutal if "brawny" Wycherley-a classification almost to be paralleled with that which in the days of our fathers saw fit to couple together the names of Balzac and of Sue. Any competent critic will always recognise in The Way of the World one of the glories, in The Country Wife one of the disgraces, of dramatic and of English literature. The stains discernible on the masterpiece of Congreve are trivial and conventional; the mere conception of the other man's work displays a mind so prurient and leprous, uncovers such an unfathomable and unimaginable beastliness of imagination, that in the present age at least he would probably have figured as a virtuous journalist and professional rebuker of poetic vice or artistic aberration.

{63} Since this passage first went to press, I have received from Dr. Grosart the most happy news that he has procured a perfect copy of this precious volume, and will shortly add it to his occasional issues of golden waifs and strays forgotten by the ebb-tide of time. Not even the disinterment of Robert Chester's "glorified" poem, with its appended jewels of verse from Shakespeare's very hand and from others only less great than Shakespeare's, all now at last reset in their strange original framework, was a gift of greater price than this.

{89} Compare with Beaumont's admirable farce of Bessus the wretched imitation of it attempted after his death in the Nice Valour of Fletcher; whose proper genius was neither for pure tragedy nor broad farce, but for high comedy and heroic romance-a field of his own invention; witness Monsieur Thomas and The Knight of Malta: while Beaumont has approved himself in tragedy all but the worthiest disciple of Shakespeare, in farce beyond all comparison the aptest pupil of Jonson. He could give us no Fox or Alchemist; but the inventor of Bessus and Calianax was worthy of the esteem and affection returned to him by the creator of Morose and Rabbi Busy.

{92} A desperate attempt has been made to support the metrical argument in favour of Fletcher's authorship by the production of a list in which such words as slavery, emperor, pitying, difference, and even Christians, were actually registered as trisyllabic terminations. To such unimaginable shifts are critics of the finger-counting or syllabic school inevitably and fatally reduced in the effort to establish by rule of thumb even so much as may seem verifiable by that rule in the province of poetical criticism. Prosody is at best no more than the skeleton of verse, as verse is the body of poetry; while the gain of such painful labourers in a field they know not how to till is not even a skeleton of worthless or irrelevant fact, but the shadow of such a skeleton reflected in water. It would seem that critics who hear only through their fingers have not even fingers to hear with.

{108} "La dynastie du bon sens, inaugurée dans Panurge, continuée dans Sancho Pan?a, tourne à mal et avorte dans Falstaff." (William Shakespeare, deuxième partie, livre premier, ch. ii,)

{125} Possibly some readers may agree with my second thoughts, in thinking that one exception may here be made and some surprise be here expressed at Shakespeare's rejection of Sly's memorable query-"When will the fool come again, Sim?" It is true that he could well afford to spare it, as what could he not well afford to spare? but I will confess that it seems to me worthy of a place among his own Sly's most admirable and notable sallies of humour.

{129} History of English Dramatic Poetry, ed. 1879, vol. ii. pp.437-447. In a later part of his noble and invaluable work (vol. iii. p.188) the author quotes a passage from "the induction to A Warning for Fair Women, 1599 (to which Shakespeare most assuredly contributed)." It will be seen that I do not shrink from admitting the full weight of authority which can be thrown into the scale against my own opinion. To such an assertion from the insolent organs of pretentious ignorance I should be content with the simple rejoinder that Shakespeare most assuredly did nothing whatever of the sort; but to return such an answer in the present case would be to write myself down-and that in company to which I should most emphatically object-as something very decidedly more-and worse-than an ass.

{137} Not for the first and probably not for the last time I turn, with all confidence as with all reverence, for illustration and confirmation of my own words, to the exquisite critical genius of a long honoured and long lamented fellow-craftsman. The following admirable and final estimate of the more special element or peculiar quality in the intellectual force of Honoré de Balzac could only have been taken by the inevitable intuition and rendered by the subtlest eloquence of Charles Baudelaire. Nothing could more aptly and perfectly illustrate the distinction indicated in my text between unimaginative realism and imaginative reality.

"I have many a time been astonished that to pass for an observer should be Balzac's great popular title to fame. To me it had always seemed that it was his chief merit to be a visionary, and a passionate visionary. All his characters are gifted with the ardour of life which animated himself. All his fictions are as deeply coloured as dreams. From the highest of the aristocracy to the lowest of the mob, all the actors in his Human Comedy are keener after living, more active and cunning in their struggles, more staunch in endurance of misfortune, more ravenous in enjoyment, more angelic in devotion, than the comedy of the real world shows them to us. In a word, every one in Balzac, down to the very scullions, has genius. Every mind is a weapon loaded to the muzzle with will. It is actually Balzac himself. And as all the beings of the outer world presented themselves to his mind's eye in strong relief and with a telling expression, he has given a convulsive action to his figures; he has blackened their shadows and intensified their lights. Besides, his prodigious love of detail, the outcome of an immoderate ambition to see everything, to bring everything to sight, to guess everything, to make others guess everything, obliged him to set down more forcibly the principal lines, so as to preserve the perspective of the whole. He reminds me sometimes of those etchers who are never satisfied with the biting-in of their outlines, and transform into very ravines the main scratches of the plate. From this astonishing natural disposition of mind wonderful results have been produced. But this disposition is generally defined as Balzac's great fault. More properly speaking, it is exactly his great distinctive duality. But who can boast of being so happily gifted, and of being able to apply a method which may permit him to invest-and that with a sure hand-what is purely trivial with splendour and imperial purple? Who can do this? Now, he who does not, to speak the truth, does no great thing."

Nor was any very great thing done by the author of A Warning for Fair Women.

{141} I do not know or remember in the whole radiant range of Elizabethan drama more than one parallel tribute to that paid in this play by an English poet to the yet foreign art of painting, through the eloquent mouth of this enthusiastic villain of genius, whom we might regard as a more genuinely Titianic sort of Wainwright. The parallel passage is that most lovely and fervid of all imaginative panegyrics on this art, extracted by Lamb from the comedy of Doctor Dodipoll; which saw the light or twilight of publication just eight years later than Arden of Feversham.

{154} I remember to have somewhere at some time fallen in with some remark by some commentator to some such effect as this: that it would be somewhat difficult to excuse the unwomanly violence of this demand. Doubtless it would. And doubtless it would be somewhat more than difficult to extenuate the unmaidenly indelicacy of Jeanne Darc.

{179} What would at least be partly lust in another man is all but purely hatred in Iago.

Now I do love her too:

Not out of absolute lust, (though, peradventure,

I stand accountant for as great a sin)

But partly led to diet my revenge.

For "partly" read "wholly," and for "peradventure" read "assuredly," and the incarnate father of lies, made manifest in the flesh, here speaks all but all the truth for once, to himself alone.

{205} I add the proof in a footnote, so as to take up no more than a small necessary space of my text with the establishment of a fact which yet can seem insignificant to no mortal who has a human ear for lyric song. Shakespeare's verse, as all the wide world knows, ends thus:

But my kisses bring again,

bring again,

Seals of love, but sealed in vain,

sealed in vain.

The echo has been dropped by Fletcher, who has thus achieved the remarkable musical feat of turning a nightingale's note into a sparrow's. The mutilation of Philomela by the hands of Tereus was a jest compared to the mutilation of Shakespeare by the hands of Fletcher: who thereby reduced the close of the first verse into agreement if not into accordance with the close of his own. This appended verse, as all the world does not and need not know, ends thus:

But first set my poor heart free,

Bound in those icy chains by thee.

Even an earless owner of fingers enough to count on may by their help convince himself of the difference in metre here. But not only does the last line, with unsolicited and literally superfluous liberality, offer us a syllable over measure; the words are such as absolutely to defy antiphonal repetition or reverberation of the three last in either line. Let us therefore, like good scriptural scholars, according equally to the letter and the spirit of the text, render unto Fletcher the things which be Fletcher's, and unto Shakespeare the things which be Shakespeare's.

{210} It is worth remark that in a still older sample of an older and ruder form of play than can have been the very earliest mould in which the pristine or pre-Shakespearean model of Pericles was cast, the part of Chorus here assigned to Gower was filled by a representative of his fellow-poet Lydgate.

{217} Except perhaps one little word of due praise for the pretty imitation or recollection of his dead friend Beaumont rather than of Shakespeare, in the description of the crazed girl whose "careless tresses a wreath of bullrush rounded" where she sat playing with flowers for emblems at a game of love and sorrow-but liker in all else to Bellario by another fountain-side than to Ophelia by the brook of death.

{220} On the 17th of September, 1864.

{232} The once too celebrated crime which in this play was exhibited on the public stage with the forcible fidelity of a wellnigh brutal realism took actual place on the private stage of fact in the year 1604. Four years afterwards the play was published as Shakespeare's. Eight years more, and Shakespeare was with ?schylus.

{237} Written in 1879.

{239} Capell has altered this to "proud perfumes"; marking the change in a note, with the scrupulous honesty which would seem to have usually distinguished him from more daring and more famous editors.

{245a} The feeble archaic inversion in this line is one among many small signs which all together suffice, if not to throw back the date of this play to the years immediately preceding the advent of Marlowe or the full influence of his genius and example, yet certainly to mark it as an instance of survival from that period of incomposite and inadequate workmanship in verse.

{245b} Or than this play to a genuine work of Shakespeare's. "Brick to coral"-these three words describe exactly the difference in tone and shade of literary colour.

{246} Here for the first time we come upon a verse not unworthy of Marlowe himself-a verse in spirit as in cadence recalling the deep oceanic reverberations of his "mighty line," profound and just and simple and single as a note of the music of the sea. But it would be hard if a devout and studious disciple were never to catch one passing tone of his master's habitual accent.-It may be worth while to observe that we find here the same modulation of verse-common enough since then, but new to the patient auditors of Gorboduc and Locrine-which we find in the finest passage of Marlowe's imperfect play of Dido, completed by Nash after the young Master's untimely death.

Why star'st thou in my face? If thou wilt stay,

Leap in my arms: mine arms are open wide:

If not-turn from me, and I'll turn from thee;

For though thou hast the power to say farewell,

I have not power to stay thee.

But we may look long in vain for the like of this passage, taken from the crudest and feeblest work of Marlowe, in the wide and wordy expanse of King Edward III.

{247} A pre-Shakespearean word of single occurrence in a single play of Shakespeare's, and proper to the academic school of playwrights.

{248} The First Part of Tamburlaine the Great, Act v. Sc. ii.

{252} It may be worth a remark that the word power is constantly used as a dissyllable; another note of archaic debility or insufficiency in metre.

{255} Yet another essentially non-Shakespearean word, though doubtless once used by Shakespeare; this time a most ungraceful Gallicism.

{256} It may obviate any chance of mistake if I observe that here as elsewhere, when I mention the name that is above every name in English literature, I refer to the old Shakespeare, and not to "the new Shakspere"; a novus homo with whom I have no acquaintance, and with whom (if we may judge of a great-or a little-unknown after the appearance and the bearing of those who select him as a social sponsor for themselves and their literary catechumens) I can most sincerely assert that I desire to have none.

{261} Surely, for sweet'st we should read swift'st.

{262a} This word occurs but once in Shakespeare's plays-

And speaking it, he wistly looked on me;

(King Richard II. Act v. Sc. 4.)

and in such a case, as in the previous instances of the words invocate and endamagement, a mere απαξ λεyομενον can carry no weight of evidence with it worth any student's consideration.

{262b} This form is used four times by Shakespeare as the equivalent of Bretagne; once only, in one of his latest plays, as a synonym for Britain.

{263a} Another word indiscoverable in any genuine verse of Shakespeare's, though not (I believe) unused on occasion by some among the poets contemporary with his earlier years.

{263b} This word was perhaps unnecessarily altered by our good Capell to "tender."

{264a} Yet another and a singular misuse of a word never so used or misused by Shakespeare.

{264b} Qu. Why, so is your desire: If that the law, etc.?

{264c} Sic. I should once have thought it impossible that any mortal ear could endure the shock of this unspeakable and incomparable verse, and find in the passage which contains it an echo or a trace of the "music, wit, and oracle" of Shakespeare. But in those days I had yet to learn what manner of ears are pricked up to listen "when rank Thersites opes his mastiff jaws" in criticism of Homer or of Shakespeare. In a corner of the preface to an edition of "Shakspere" which bears on its title-page the name (correctly spelt) of Queen Victoria's youngest son prefixed to the name I have just transcribed, a small pellet of dry dirt was flung upwards at me from behind by the "able editor" thus irritably impatient to figure in public as the volunteer valet or literary lackey of Prince Leopold. Hence I gathered the edifying assurance that this aspirant to the honours of literature in livery had been reminded of my humbler attempts in literature without a livery by the congenial music of certain four-footed fellow-critics and fellow-lodgers of his own in the neighbourhood of Hampstead Heath. Especially and most naturally had their native woodnotes wild recalled to the listening biped (whom partial nature had so far distinguished from the herd) the deep astonishment and the due disgust with which he had discovered the unintelligible fact that to men so ignorant of music or the laws of music in verse as my presumptuous and pitiable self the test of metrical harmony lay not in an appeal to the fingers but only in an appeal to the ear-"the ear which he" (that is, which the present writer) "makes so much of-AND WHICH SHOULD BE LONG TO MEASURE SHAKSPERE." Here then the great Sham Shakespearean secret is out at last. Had I but known in time my lifelong error in thinking that a capacity to estimate the refinements of word-music was not to be gauged by length of ear, by hairiness of ear, or by thickness of ear, but by delicacy of ear alone, I should as soon have thought of measuring my own poor human organs against those of the patriarch or leader of the herd as of questioning his indisputable right to lay down the law to all who agree with his great fundamental theorem-that the longest ear is the most competent to judge of metre. Habemus confitentem asinum.

{266} A Latin pun, or rather a punning Latinism, not altogether out of Shakespeare's earliest line. But see the note preceding this one.

{269} The simple substitution of the word "is" for the word "and" would rectify the grammar here-were that worth while.

{270} Qu. So there is but one France, etc.?

{271} Non-Shakespearean.

{273} I choose for a parallel Shakespeare's use of Plutarch in the composition of his Roman plays rather than his use of Hall and Holinshed in the composition of his English histories, because Froissart is a model more properly to be set against Plutarch than against Holinshed or Hall.

{278} This brilliant idea has since been borrowed from the Chairman-and that without acknowledgment-by one of those worthies whose mission it is to make manifest that no burlesque invention of mere man's device can improve upon the inexhaustible capacities of Nature as shown in the production and perfection of the type irreverently described by Dryden as 'God Almighty's fool.'

{279} This word was incomprehensibly misprinted in the first issue of the Society's Report, where it appeared as "foulness." To prevent misapprehension, the whole staff of printers was at once discharged.

{291} When the learned member made use of this remarkable phrase he probably had in his mind the suggestive query of Agnès, si les enfants qu'on fait se faisaient pas l'oreille? But the flower of rhetoric here gathered was beyond the reach of Arnolphe's innocent ward. The procreation in such a case is even more difficult for fancy to realise than the conception.