Here we find a very riot of rhymes, wild and wanton in their half-grown grace as a troop of “young satyrs, tender-hoofed and ruddy-horned”; during certain scenes we seem almost to stand again by the cradle of new-born comedy, and hear the first lisping and laughing accents run over from her baby lips in bubbling rhyme; but when the note changes we recognise the speech of gods.  For the first time in our literature the higher key of poetic or romantic comedy is finely touched to a fine issue.  The divine instrument fashioned by Marlowe for tragic purposes alone has found at once its new sweet use in the hands of Shakespeare.  The way is prepared for As You Like It and the Tempest; the language is discovered which will befit the lips of Rosalind and Miranda.

What was highest as poetry in the Comedy of Errors was mainly in rhyme; all indeed, we might say, between the prelude spoken by AEgeon and the appearance in the last scene of his wife:  in Love’s Labour’s Lost what was highest was couched wholly in blank verse; in the Two Gentlemen of Verona rhyme has fallen seemingly into abeyance, and there are no passages of such elegiac beauty as in the former, of such exalted eloquence as in the latter of these plays; there is an even sweetness, a simple equality of grace in thought and language which keeps the whole poem in tune, written as it is in a subdued key of unambitious harmony.  In perfect unity and keeping the composition of this beautiful sketch may perhaps be said to mark a stage of advance, a new point of work attained, a faint but sensible change of manner, signalised by increased firmness of hand and clearness of outline.  Slight and swift in execution as it is, few and simple as are the chords here struck of character and emotion, every shade of drawing and every note of sound is at one with the whole scheme of form and music.  Here too is the first dawn of that higher and more tender humour which was never given in such perfection to any man as ultimately to Shakespeare; one touch of the by-play of Launce and his immortal dog is worth all the bright fantastic interludes of Boyet and Adriano, Costard and Holofernes; worth even half the sallies of Mercutio, and half the dancing doggrel or broad-witted prose of either Dromio.  But in the final poem which concludes and crowns the first epoch of Shakespeare’s work, the special graces and peculiar glories of each that went before are gathered together as in one garland “of every hue and every scent.”  The young genius of the master of all our poets finds its consummation in the Midsummer Night’s Dream.  The blank verse is as full, sweet, and strong as the best of Biron’s or Romeo’s; the rhymed verse as clear, pure, and true as the simplest and truest melody of Venus and Adonis or the Comedy of Errors.  But here each kind of excellence is equal throughout; there are here no purple patches on a gown of serge, but one seamless and imperial