’Now by my life, this day grows wondrous hot;
  Some airy devil hovers in the sky.’

On which Coleridge writes:—­

’I prefer the old text:  the word ‘devil’ implies ‘fiery.’  You need only to read the line, laying a full and strong emphasis on ‘devil,’ to perceive the uselessness and tastelessness of Warburton’s alteration.’

The test is absolutely convincing—­a poet’s criticism of poetry.  But that Coleridge went astray not once but many times, under the influence of his idolatry of Shakespeare, corroborates the general conclusion that is forced upon any one who will take the trouble to read a whole volume of the modern Variorum.  There has been much editing, much comment, but singularly little criticism of Shakespeare; a half-pennyworth of bread to an intolerable deal of sack.  The pendulum has swung violently from niggling and insensitive textual quibble to that equally distressing exercise of human ingenuity, idealistic encomium, of which there is a typical example in the opening sentence of Mr Masefield’s remarks upon the play:  ’Like the best Shakespearean tragedies, King John is an intellectual form in which a number of people with obsessions illustrate the idea of treachery.’  We remember that Mr Masefield has much better than this to say of Shakespeare in his little book; but we fasten upon this sentence because it is set before us in the Variorum, and because it too ’is an intellectual form in which a literary man with obsessions illustrates his idea of criticism.’  Genetically, it is a continuation of the shoddy element in Coleridge’s Shakespeare criticism, a continual bias towards transcendental interpretation of the obvious.  To take the origin a phase further back, it is the portentous offspring of the feeble constituent of German philosophy (a refusal to see the object) after it had been submitted to an idle process of ferment in the softer part of Coleridge’s brain.

King John is not in the least what Mr Masefield, under this dangerous influence, has persuaded himself it is.  It is simply the effort of a young man of great genius to rewrite a bad play into a good one.  The effort was, on the whole, amazingly successful; that the play is only a good one, instead of a very good one, is not surprising.  The miracle is that anything should have been made of The Troublesome Raigne at all.  The Variorum extracts show that, of the many commentators who studied the old play with Shakespeare’s version, only Swinburne saw, or had the courage to say, how utterly null the old play really is.  To have made Shakespeare’s Falconbridge out of the old lay figure, to have created the scenes between Hubert and John, and Hubert and Arthur, out of that decrepit skeleton—­that is the work of a commanding poetical genius on the threshold of full mastery of its powers, worthy of all wonder, no doubt, but doubly worthy of close examination.