two or more chances which resemble or somehow fit into each other.  If you rattle six dice in a box and throw them, and they turn up at haphazard—­say, two aces, a deuce, two fours, and a six—­there is nothing remarkable in this falling out.  But if they all turn up sixes, you at once suspect that the dice are cogged; and if that be not so—­if there be no sufficient cause behind the phenomenon—­you say that this identical falling-out of six separate possibilities was a remarkable coincidence.  Now, applying the illustration to drama, I should say that the playwright is perfectly justified in letting chance play its probable and even inevitable part in the affairs of his characters; but that, the moment we suspect him of cogging the dice, we feel that he is taking an unfair advantage of us, and our imagination either cries, “I won’t play!” or continues the game under protest.

Some critics have considered it a flaw in Shakespeare’s art that the catastrophe of Romeo and Juliet should depend upon a series of chances, and especially on the miscarriage of the Friar’s letter to Romeo.  This is not, I think, a valid criticism.  We may, if we are so minded, pick to pieces the course of action which brought these chances into play.  The device of the potion—­even if such a drug were known to the pharmacopoeia—­is certainly a very clumsy method of escape from the position in which Juliet is placed by her father’s obstinacy.  But when once we have accepted that integral part of the legend, the intervention of chance in the catastrophe is entirely natural and probable.  Observe that there is no coincidence in the matter, no interlinking or dovetailing of chances.  The catastrophe results from the hot-headed impetuosity of all the characters, which so hurries events that there is no time for the elimination of the results of chance.  Letters do constantly go astray, even under our highly-organized system of conveyance; but their delay or disappearance seldom leads to tragic results, because most of us have learnt to take things calmly and wait for the next post.  Yet if we could survey the world at large, it is highly probable that every day or every hour we should somewhere or other find some Romeo on the verge of committing suicide because of a chance misunderstanding with regard to his Juliet; and in a certain percentage of cases the explanatory letter or telegram would doubtless arrive too late.

We all remember how, in Mr. Hardy’s Tess, the main trouble arises from the fact that the letter pushed under Angel Clare’s door slips also under the carpet of his room, and so is never discovered.  This is an entirely probable chance; and the sternest criticism would hardly call it a flaw in the structure of the fable.  But take another case:  Madame X has had a child, of whom she has lost sight for more than twenty years, during which she has lived abroad.  She returns to France, and immediately on landing at Bordeaux she kills a man who accompanies