study of Michael, in whom even physical fear becomes tragic, and cowardice itself no ludicrous infirmity but rather a terrible passion; I cannot but finally take heart to say, even in the absence of all external or traditional testimony, that it seems to me not pardonable merely nor permissible, but simply logical and reasonable, to set down this poem, a young man’s work on the face of it, as the possible work of no man’s youthful hand but Shakespeare’s.

No similar question is raised, no parallel problem stated, in the case of any one other among the plays now or ever ascribed on grounds more or less dubious to that same indubitable hand.  This hand I do not recognise even in the Yorkshire Tragedy, full as it is to overflowing of fierce animal power, and hot as with the furious breath of some caged wild beast.  Heywood, who as the most realistic and in some sense prosaic dramatist of his time has been credited (though but in a modestly tentative and suggestive fashion) with its authorship, was as incapable of writing it as Chapman of writing the Shakespearean parts of The Two Noble Kinsmen or Fletcher of writing the scenes of Wolsey’s fall and Katherine’s death in King Henry VIII.  To the only editor of Shakespeare responsible for the two earlier of the three suggestions here set aside, they may be forgiven on the score of insufficient scholarship and want of critical training; but on what ground the third suggestion can be excused in the case of men who should have a better right than most others to speak with some show of authority on a point of higher criticism, I must confess myself utterly at a loss to imagine.  In the Yorkshire Tragedy the submissive devotion of its miserable heroine to her maddened husband is merely doglike,—­though not even, in the exquisitely true and tender phrase of our sovereign poetess, “most passionately patient.”  There is no likeness in this poor trampled figure to “one of Shakespeare’s women”:  Griselda was no ideal of his.  To find its parallel in the dramatic literature of the great age, we must look to lesser great men than Shakespeare.  Ben Jonson, a too exclusively masculine poet, will give us a couple of companion figures for her—­or one such figure at least; for the wife of Fitzdottrel, submissive as she is even to the verge of undignified if not indecorous absurdity, is less of a human spaniel than the wife of Corvino.  Another such is Robert Davenport’s Abstemia, so warmly admired by Washington Irving; another is the heroine of that singularly powerful and humorous tragi-comedy, labelled to How to Choose a Good Wife from a Bad, which in its central situation anticipates that of Leigh Hunt’s beautiful Legend of Florence; while Decker has revived, in one of our sweetest and most graceful examples of dramatic romance, the original incarnation of that somewhat pitiful ideal which even in a ruder and more Russian century of painful European progress out of night and winter could only be made credible, acceptable, or endurable, by the yet unequalled genius of Chaucer and Boccaccio.