“The great’st Grace lending grace,
    Ere twice the horses of the Sun shall bring
    Their fiery torcher his diurnal ring;
    Ere twice in murk and occidental damp
    Moist Hesperus hath quench’d his sleepy lamp;
    Or four-and-twenty times the pilot’s glass
    Hath told the thievish minutes how they pass;
    What is infirm from your sound parts shall fly,
    Health shall live free, and sickness freely die.”

Here we have the special traits of Shakespeare’s youthful style,—­an air of artifice and studied finery, a certain self-conscious elaborateness and imitative rivalry,—­which totally disappear in, for instance, the blessing the Countess gives her son as he is leaving for the Court: 

    “Be thou blest, Bertram! and succeed thy father
    In manners, as in shape! thy blood and virtue
    Contend for empire in thee, and thy goodness
    Share with thy birthright!  Love all, trust a few,
    Do wrong to none; be able for thine enemy
    Rather in power than use, and keep thy friend
    Under thy own life’s key; be check’d for silence,
    But never tax’d for speech.  What Heaven more will,
    That thee may furnish, and my prayers pluck down,
    Fall on thy head!”

I the rather quote this latter, because of its marked resemblance to the advice Polonius gives his son in Hamlet.  Mr. White justly observes that “either the latter is an expansion of the former, or the former a reminiscence of the latter”; and I fully concur with him that the second part of the alternative is the more probable.  It is hardly needful to add that the passage here quoted breathes a higher and purer moral tone than the resembling one in Hamlet; but this I take to be merely because the venerable Countess is a higher and purer source than the old politician.  For a broader and bulkier illustration of the point in hand, the student probably cannot do better than by comparing in full the dialogue from which the first of the forecited passages is taken with the whole of the second scene in Act i.  These seem to me at least as apt and telling examples as any, of the Poet’s rawest and ripest styles so strangely mixed in this play; and the difference is here so clearly pronounced, that one must be dull indeed not to perceive it.

As regards the notion of Mr. Hunter before referred to, it is indeed true, as he argues, that the play twice bespeaks its present title; but both instances occur in just those parts which relish most of the Poet’s later style.  And the line in the epilogue,—­“All is well ended, if this suit be won,”—­may be fairly understood as intimating some connection between the two titles which the play is supposed to have borne.

* * * * *

The only known source from which the Poet could have borrowed any part of this play is a story in Boccaccio, entitled Giletta di Nerbona.  In 1566 William Paynter published an English version of this tale in his Palace of Pleasure.  Here it was, no doubt, that Shakespeare got his borrowed matter; and the following outline will show the nature and extent of his obligations.