eloquence and passionate effusion, yet his comic genius was of a rarer and more precious quality; one Spanish Curate is worth many a Valentinian; as, on the other hand, one Philaster is worth many a Scornful Lady.  Now there is no question here of Beaumont; and there is no question that the passage here debated has been taken to the heart of the whole world and baptized in the tears of generations as no work of Fletcher’s has ever been.  That Beaumont could have written it I do not believe; but I am wellnigh assured that Fletcher could not.  I can scarcely imagine that the most fluid sympathy, the “hysteric passion” most easily distilled from the eyes of reader or spectator, can ever have watered with its tears the scene or the page which sets forth, however eloquently and effectively, the sorrows and heroisms of Ordella, Juliana, or Lucina.  Every success but this I can well believe them, as they assuredly deserve, to have attained.

To this point then we have come, as to the crucial point at issue; and looking back upon those passages of the play which first suggest the handiwork of Fletcher, and which certainly do now and then seem almost identical in style with his, I think we shall hardly find the difference between these and other parts of the same play so wide and so distinct as the difference between the undoubted work of Fletcher and the undoubted work of Shakespeare.  What that difference is we are fortunately able to determine with exceptional certitude, and with no supplementary help from conjecture of probabilities.  In the play which is undoubtedly a joint work of these poets the points of contact and the points of disunion are unmistakable by the youngest eye.  In the very last scene of The Two Noble Kinsmen, we can tell with absolute certainty what speeches were appended or interpolated by Fletcher; we can pronounce with positive conviction what passages were completed and what parts were left unfinished by Shakespeare.  Even on Mr. Spedding’s theory it can hardly be possible to do as much for King Henry VIII.  The lines of demarcation, however visible or plausible, are fainter by far than these.  It is certainly not much less strange to come upon such passages in the work of Shakespeare as the speeches of Buckingham and Cranmer than it would be to encounter in the work of Sophocles a sample of the later and laxer style of Euripides; to meet for instance in the Antigone with a passage which might pass muster as an extract from the Iphigenia in Aulis.  In metrical effects the style of the lesser English poet is an exact counterpart of the style of the lesser Greek; there is the same comparative tenuity and fluidity of verse, the same excess of short unemphatic syllables, the same solution of the graver iambic into soft overflow of lighter and longer feet which relaxes and dilutes the solid harmony of tragic metre with notes of a more facile and feminine strain.  But in King Henry VIII.