on a monument smiling at grief”—­too famous we might call it for its own fame—­is transfigured as from human beauty to divine, in its transformation to the comparison of Marina’s look with that of “Patience gazing on kings’ graves, and smiling Extremity out of act.”  A precisely similar parallel is one to which I have referred elsewhere; that between the two passages respectively setting forth the reciprocal love of Helena and Hermia, of Emilia and Flavina.  The change of style and spirit in either case of reiteration is the change from a simpler to a sublimer form of beauty.

In the two first acts of Pericles there are faint and rare but evident and positive traces of a passing touch from the hasty hand of Shakespeare:  even here too we may say after Dido:—­

   Nec tam aversus equos Tyria sol jungit ab urbe.

It has been said that those most unmistakable verses on “the blind mole” are not such as any man could insert into another man’s work, or slip in between the lines of an inferior poet:  and that they occur naturally enough in a speech of no particular excellence.  I take leave decisively to question the former assertion, and flatly to contradict the latter.  The pathetic and magnificent lines in dispute do not occur naturally enough, or at all naturally, among the very poor, flat, creeping verses between which they have been thrust with such over freehanded recklessness.  No purple patch was ever more pitifully out of place.  There is indeed no second example of such wanton and wayward liberality; but the generally lean and barren style of these opening acts does not crawl throughout on exactly the same low level.

The last of the only three plays with which I venture to find any fault on the score of moral taste is the first on my list of the only three plays belonging to this last period on which, as they now stand, I trace the indisputable track of another touch than Shakespeare’s.  But in the two cases remaining our general task of distinction should on the whole be simple and easy enough for the veriest babes and sucklings in the lower school of Shakespeare.

That the two great posthumous fragments we possess of Shakespeare’s uncompleted work are incomplete simply because the labour spent on either was cut short by his timeless death is the first natural assumption of any student with an eye quick enough to catch the point where the traces of his hand break off; but I should now be inclined to guess rather that on reconsideration of the subjects chosen he had rejected or dismissed them for a time at least as unfit for dramatic handling.  It could have needed no great expenditure of reasoning or reflection to convince a man of lesser mind and less experience than Shakespeare’s that no subject could possibly be more unmanageable, more indomitably improper for such a purpose, than he had selected in Timon of Athens.  How he came ever to fall across such a subject, to hit upon such a choice,