In the greater part of this third period, taking a swift and general view of it for contrast or comparison of qualities with the second, we constantly find beauty and melody, transfigured into harmony and sublimity; an exchange unquestionably for the better:  but in certain stages, or only perhaps in a single stage of it, we frequently find humour and reality supplanted by realism and obscenity; an exchange undeniably for the worse.  The note of his earliest comic style was often a boyish or a birdlike wantonness, very capable of such liberties and levities as those of Lesbia’s sparrow with the lip or bosom of his mistress; as notably in the parts of Boyet and Mercutio:  and indeed there is a bright vein of mere wordy wilfulness running throughout the golden youth of the two plays which connects Love’s Labour’s Lost with Romeo and Juliet as by a thread of floss silk not always “most excellently ravelled,” nor often unspotted or unentangled.  In the second period this gaiety was replaced by the utmost frankness and fullness of humour, as a boy’s merry madness by the witty wisdom of a man:  but now for a time it would seem as if the good comic qualities of either period were displaced and ousted by mere coarseness and crudity like that of a hard harsh photograph.  This ultra-Circean transformation of spirit and brutification of speech we do not find in the lighter interludes of great and perfect tragedy:  for the porter in Macbeth makes hardly an exception worth naming.  It is when we come upon the singular little group of two or three plays not accurately definable at all but roughly describable as tragi-comedies, or more properly in two cases at least as tragedies docked of their natural end, curtailed of the due catastrophe—­it is then that we find for the swift sad bright lightnings of laughter from the lips of the sweet and bitter fool whose timeless disappearance from the stage of King Lear seems for once a sure sign of inexplicable weariness or forgetfulness on Shakespeare’s part, so nauseous and so sorry a substitute as the fetid fun and rancid ribaldry of Pandarus and Thersites.  I must have leave to say that the coincidence of these two in the scheme of a single play is a thing hardly bearable by men who object to too strong a savour of those too truly “Eternal Cesspools” over which the first of living humourists holds as it were for ever an everlasting nose—­or rather, in one sense, does not hold but expand it for the fuller inhalation of their too congenial fumes with an apparent relish which will always seem the most deplorable to those who the most gratefully and reasonably admire that high heroic genius, for love of which the wiser sort of men must finally forgive all the noisy aberrations of his misanthropy and philobulgary, anti-Gallican and Russolatrous insanities of perverse and morbid eloquence.