Shakespeare into the mouth of his latest Roman hero.  They “cannot hold this visible shape” in which the poet at first presents them even long enough to leave a distinct image, a decisive impression for better or for worse, upon the mind’s eye of the most simple and open-hearted reader.  They are ghosts, not men; simulacra modis pallentia miris.  You cannot descry so much as the original intention of the artist’s hand which began to draw and relaxed its hold of the brush before the first lines were fairly traced.  And in the last, the worst and weakest scene of all, in which York pleads with Bolingbroke for the death of the son whose mother pleads against her husband for his life, there is a final relapse into rhyme and rhyming epigram, into the “jigging vein” dried up (we might have hoped) long since by the very glance of Marlowe’s Apollonian scorn.  It would be easy, agreeable, and irrational to ascribe without further evidence than its badness this misconceived and misshapen scene to some other hand than Shakespeare’s.  It is below the weakest, the rudest, the hastiest scene attributable to Marlowe; it is false, wrong, artificial beyond the worst of his bad and boyish work; but it has a certain likeness for the worse to the crudest work of Shakespeare.  It is difficult to say to what depths of bad taste the writer of certain passages in Venus and Adonis could not fall before his genius or his judgment was full-grown.  To invent an earlier play on the subject and imagine this scene a surviving fragment, a floating waif of that imaginary wreck, would in my opinion be an uncritical mode of evading the question at issue.  It must be regarded as the last hysterical struggle of rhyme to maintain its place in tragedy; and the explanation, I would fain say the excuse, of its reappearance may perhaps be simply this; that the poet was not yet dramatist enough to feel for each of his characters an equal or proportionate regard; to divide and disperse his interest among the various crowd of figures which claim each in its place, and each after its kind, fair and adequate share of their creator’s attention and sympathy.  His present interest was here wholly concentrated on the single figure of Richard; and when that for the time was absent, the subordinate figures became to him but heavy and vexatious encumbrances, to be shifted on and off the stage with as much of haste and as little of labour as might be possible to an impatient and uncertain hand.  Now all tragic poets, I presume, from AEschylus the godlike father of them all to the last aspirant who may struggle after the traces of his steps, have been poets before they were tragedians; their lips have had power to sing before their feet had strength to tread the stage, before their hands had skill to paint or carve figures from the life.  With Shakespeare it was so as certainly as with Shelley, as evidently as with Hugo.  It is in the great comic poets, in Moliere and in Congreve, {42} our own lesser Moliere, so far inferior in breadth and depth, in tenderness and strength, to the greatest writer of the “great age,” yet so near him in science and in skill, so like him in brilliance and in force;—­it is in these that we find theatrical instinct twin-born with imaginative impulse, dramatic power with inventive perception.