dramatic and of English literature.  The stains discernible on the masterpiece of Congreve are trivial and conventional; the mere conception of the other man’s work displays a mind so prurient and leprous, uncovers such an unfathomable and unimaginable beastliness of imagination, that in the present age at least he would probably have figured as a virtuous journalist and professional rebuker of poetic vice or artistic aberration.

{63} Since this passage first went to press, I have received from Dr. Grosart the most happy news that he has procured a perfect copy of this precious volume, and will shortly add it to his occasional issues of golden waifs and strays forgotten by the ebb-tide of time.  Not even the disinterment of Robert Chester’s “glorified” poem, with its appended jewels of verse from Shakespeare’s very hand and from others only less great than Shakespeare’s, all now at last reset in their strange original framework, was a gift of greater price than this.

{89} Compare with Beaumont’s admirable farce of Bessus the wretched imitation of it attempted after his death in the Nice Valour of Fletcher; whose proper genius was neither for pure tragedy nor broad farce, but for high comedy and heroic romance—­a field of his own invention; witness Monsieur Thomas and The Knight of Malta:  while Beaumont has approved himself in tragedy all but the worthiest disciple of Shakespeare, in farce beyond all comparison the aptest pupil of Jonson.  He could give us no Fox or Alchemist; but the inventor of Bessus and Calianax was worthy of the esteem and affection returned to him by the creator of Morose and Rabbi Busy.

{92} A desperate attempt has been made to support the metrical argument in favour of Fletcher’s authorship by the production of a list in which such words as slavery, emperor, pitying, difference, and even Christians, were actually registered as trisyllabic terminations.  To such unimaginable shifts are critics of the finger-counting or syllabic school inevitably and fatally reduced in the effort to establish by rule of thumb even so much as may seem verifiable by that rule in the province of poetical criticism.  Prosody is at best no more than the skeleton of verse, as verse is the body of poetry; while the gain of such painful labourers in a field they know not how to till is not even a skeleton of worthless or irrelevant fact, but the shadow of such a skeleton reflected in water.  It would seem that critics who hear only through their fingers have not even fingers to hear with.

{108} “La dynastie du bon sens, inauguree dans Panurge, continuee dans Sancho Panca, tourne a mal et avorte dans Falstaff.” (William Shakespeare, deuxieme partie, livre premier, ch. ii,)

{125} Possibly some readers may agree with my second thoughts, in thinking that one exception may here be made and some surprise be here expressed at Shakespeare’s rejection of Sly’s memorable query—­“When will the fool come again, Sim?” It is true that he could well afford to spare it, as what could he not well afford to spare? but I will confess that it seems to me worthy of a place among his own Sly’s most admirable and notable sallies of humour.