Painter.  ’Tis common: 
  A thousand moral paintings I can show
  That shall demonstrate these quick blows of
      Fortune
  More pregnantly than words.  Yet you do
      well
  To show Lord Timon that mean eyes have
      seen
  The foot above the head.

  [Trumpets sound.  Enter Timon, attended; the
  servant of Ventidius talking with him.

Thus far (and it is of no consequence if we have once or twice forgotten it while pursuing our analysis) we have fancied ourselves present, seeing Shakspeare write this, and looking into his mind.  But although divining his intentions, we have not made him intend any more than his words show that he did intend.  Let us presently fancy, that, before introducing his principal character, he here turns back to see if he has brought in everything that is necessary.  It would have been easier to plan this scene after the rest of the play had been done,—­and, as already remarked, it may have been so written; but when the whole coheres, the artistic purpose is more or less evident in every part; and the order in which each was put upon paper is of as little consequence as the place or time or date or the state of the weather.  Wordsworth has been particular enough to let it be known, where he composed the last verse of a poem first.  With some artists the writing is a mere copying from memory of what is completely elaborated in the whole or in long passages:  Milton wrote thus, through a habit made necessary by his blindness; and so Mozart, whose incessant labors trained his genius in the paths of musical learning, or brought learning to be its slave, till his first conceptions were often beyond the reach of elaboration, and remained so clear in his own mind that he could venture to perform in public concertos to which he had written only the orchestral or accessory parts.  Other artists work seriatim; some can work only when the pen is in their hands; and the blotted page speaks eloquently enough of the artistic processes of mind to which their most passionate passages are subjected before they come to the reader’s eye.  Think of the fac-simile of Byron’s handwriting in “Childe Harold”!  It shows a soul rapt almost beyond the power of writing.  But the blots and erasures were not made by a “fine frenzy”; they speak no less eloquently for an artistic taste and skill excited and alert, and able to guide the frenzy and give it a contagious power through the forms of verse,—­this taste and this skill and control being the very elements by which his expressions become an echo of the poet’s soul,—­pleasing, or, in the uncultivated, helping to form, a like taste in the hearer, and exciting a like imagined condition of feeling and poetic vision.