Every possible reader, I suppose, will at once bethink himself of the famous passage in Measure for Measure which here may seem to be faintly prefigured: 

            It were as good
   To pardon him that hath from nature stolen
   A man already made, as to remit
   Their saucy sweetness, that do coin heaven’s image
   In stamps that are forbid: 

and the very difference of style is not wider than the gulf which gapes between the first style of Shakespeare and the last.  But men of Shakespeare’s stamp, I venture to think, do not thus repeat themselves.  The echo of the passage in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, describing the girlish friendship of Hermia and Helena, which we find in the first act of The Two Noble Kinsmen, describing the like girlish friendship of Emilia and Flavina, is an echo of another sort.  Both, I need hardly say, are unquestionably Shakespeare’s; but the fashion in which the matured poet retouches and completes the sketch of his earlier years—­composes an oil painting, as it were, from the hints and suggestions of a water-colour sketch long since designed and long since half forgotten—­is essentially different from the mere verbal and literal trick of repetition which sciolists might think to detect in the present instance.  Again we must needs fall back on the inevitable and indefinable test of style; a test which could be of no avail if we were foolish enough to appeal to scholiasts and their attendant dunces, but which should be of some avail if we appeal to experts and their attentive scholars; and by this test we can but remark that neither the passage in A Midsummer Night’s Dream nor the corresponsive passage in The Two Noble Kinsmen could have been written by any hand known to us but Shakespeare’s; whereas the passage in King Edward III. might as certainly have been written by any one out of a dozen poets then living as the answering passage in Measure for Measure could assuredly have been written by Shakespeare alone.

As on a first reading of the Hippolytus of Euripides we feel that, for all the grace and freshness and lyric charm of its opening scenes, the claim of the poem to our ultimate approval or disapproval must needs depend on the success or failure of the first interview between Theseus and his calumniated son; and as on finding that scene to be feeble and futile and prosaic and verbose we feel that the poet who had a woman’s spite against women has here effectually and finally shown himself powerless to handle the simplest elements of masculine passion, of manly character and instinct; so in this less important case we feel that the writer, having ventured on such a subject as the compulsory temptation of a daughter by a father, who has been entrapped into so shameful an undertaking through the treacherous exaction of an equivocal promise unwarily confirmed by an inconsiderate oath, must be judged by the result of his own enterprise; must fail or stand as a poet by its failure or success.  And his failure is only not complete; he is but just redeemed from utter discomfiture by the fluency and simplicity of his equable but inadequate style.  Here as before we find plentiful examples of the gracefully conventional tone current among the lesser writers of the hour.