We have wandered it may be somewhat out of the right time into a far other province of poetry than the golden land of Shakespeare’s ripest harvest-fields of humour.  And now, before we may enter the “flowery square” made by the summer growth of his four greatest works in pure and perfect comedy “beneath a broad and equal-blowing wind” of all happiest and most fragrant imagination, we have but one field to cross, one brook to ford, that hardly can be thought to keep us out of Paradise.  In the garden-plot on whose wicket is inscribed All’s Well that Ends Well, we are hardly distant from Eden itself

   About a young dove’s flutter from a wood.

The ninth story of the third day of the Decameron is one of the few subjects chosen by Shakespeare—­as so many were taken by Fletcher—­which are less fit, we may venture to think, for dramatic than for narrative treatment.  He has here again shown all possible delicacy of instinct in handling a matter which unluckily it was not possible to handle on the stage with absolute and positive delicacy of feeling or expression.  Dr. Johnson—­in my humble opinion, with some justice; though his verdict has been disputed on the score of undeserved austerity—­“could not reconcile his heart to Bertram”; and I, unworthy as I may be to second or support on the score of morality the finding of so great a moralist, cannot reconcile my instincts to Helena.  Parolles is even better than Bobadil, as Bobadil is even better than Bessus; and Lafeu is one of the very best old men in all the range of comic art.  But the whole charm and beauty of the play, the quality which raises it to the rank of its fellows by making it loveable as well as admirable, we find only in the “sweet, serene, skylike” sanctity and attraction of adorable old age, made more than ever near and dear to us in the incomparable figure of the old Countess of Roussillon.  At the close of the play, Fletcher would inevitably have married her to Lafeu—­or rather possibly, to the King.

At the entrance of the heavenly quadrilateral, or under the rising dawn of the four fixed stars which compose our Northern Cross among the constellations of dramatic romance hung high in the highest air of poetry, we may well pause for very dread of our own delight, lest unawares we break into mere babble of childish rapture and infantile thanksgiving for such light vouchsafed even to our “settentrional vedovo sito” that even at their first dawn out of the depths

   Goder pareva il ciel di lor fiammelle.

Beyond these again we see a second group arising, the supreme starry trinity of the Winter’s Tale, the Tempest, and Cymbeline:  and beyond these the divine darkness of everlasting and all-maternal night.  These seven lamps of the romantic drama have in them—­if I may strain the similitude a little further yet—­more of lyric light than could fitly be lent to feed the fire or the sunshine of the worlds of pure tragedy or comedy.  There is more play, more vibration as it were, in the splendours of their spheres.  Only in the heaven of Shakespeare’s making can we pass and repass at pleasure from the sunny to the stormy lights, from the glory of Cymbeline to the glory of Othello.