Yet if it were made a question, to be decided from internal evidence, whether the scene here analyzed was written before or after the rest of the piece, a strong argument for its being written before might be found in the peculiar impression it leaves upon the fancy.  Let us suppose we follow the author while he runs it over, which he does quite rapidly, since there are no blotted lines, but only here and there a comma to be inserted.  He designed to open his tragedy.  He finds he has set a scene,—­in his mind’s eye the entrance-hall to an Athenian house, which he thinks he has presently intimated plainly enough to be Timon’s house.  Here he has brought forward four actors and made them speak as just meeting; they come by twos from different ways, and the first two immediately make it known that the other two are a merchant and jeweller, and almost immediately that they themselves are, one a painter, the other a poet.  They have all brought gifts or goods for the lord Timon.  The Athenian Senators pass over, and, as becomes their dignity, are at once received in an inner hall,—­the first four remaining on the stage.  All is so far clear.  He has also, by the dialogue of the Painter and Poet, made in itself taking to the attention through the picture and the flighty recitation, suggested and interested us incidentally in the character of Timon, and conveyed a vague misgiving of misfortune to come to him.  And there is withal a swelling pomp, three parts rhetorical and one part genuinely poetical, in the Poet’s style, which gives a tone, and prepares the fancy to enter readily into the spirit of the tragedy.  This effect the author wished to produce; he felt that the piece required it; he was so preoccupied with the Timon he conceived that he sets to work with a Timon-rich hue of fancy and feeling; to this note he pitches himself, and begins his measured march “bold and forth on.”  What he has assumed to feel he wishes spectators to feel; and he leaves his style to be colored by his feeling, because he knows that such is the way to make them feel it.  And we do feel it, and know also that we are made thus to feel through an art which we can perceive and admire.  On the whole, this introduction opens upon the tragedy with just such a display of high-sounding phrases, such a fine appropriateness, such a vague presentiment, and such a rapid, yet artful, rising from indifference to interest, that it seems easiest to suppose the author to be writing while his conceptions of what is to follow are freshest and as yet unwrought out.  We cannot ask him; even while we have overlooked him in his labor, his form has faded, and we are again in this dull every-day Present.