we can spend no profitable time or pains in trying to conjecture.  It is clear, however, that at all events there was a season when the inexplicable attraction of it was too strong for him to resist the singular temptation to embody in palpable form, to array in dramatic raiment, to invest with imaginative magnificence, the godless ascetic passion of misanthropy, the martyrdom of an atheistic Stylites.  Timon is doubtless a man of far nobler type than any monomaniac of the tribe of Macarius:  but his immeasurable superiority in spiritual rank to the hermit fathers of the desert serves merely to make him a thought madder and a grain more miserable than the whole Thebaid of Christomaniacs rolled into one.  Foolish and fruitless as it has ever been to hunt through Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets on the false scent of a fantastic trail, to put thaumaturgic trust in a dark dream of tracking his untraceable personality through labyrinthine byways of life and visionary crossroads of character, it is yet surely no blind assumption to accept the plain evidence in both so patent before us, that he too like other men had his dark seasons of outer or of inner life, and like other poets found them or made them fruitful as well as bitter, though it might be but of bitter fruit.  And of such there is here enough to glut the gorge of all the monks in monkery, or strengthen for a forty days’ fast any brutallest unwashed theomaniac of the Thebaid.  The most unconscionably unclean of all foul-minded fanatics might have been satisfied with the application to all women from his mother upwards of the monstrous and magnificent obloquy found by Timon as insufficient to overwhelm as his gold was inadequate to satisfy one insatiable and indomitable “brace of harlots.”  In Troilus and Cressida we found too much that Swift might have written when half inspired by the genius of Shakespeare; in the great and terrible fourth act of Timon we find such tragedy as Juvenal might have written when half deified by the spirit of AEschylus.

There is a noticeable difference between the case of Timon and the two other cases (diverse enough between themselves) of late or mature work but partially assignable to the hand of Shakespeare.  In Pericles we may know exactly how much was added by Shakespeare to the work of we know not whom; in The Two Noble Kinsmen we can tell sometimes to a hair’s breadth in a hemistich by whom how much was added to the posthumous text of Shakespeare; in Timon we cannot assert with the same confidence in the same accuracy that just so many scenes and no more, just so many speeches and none other, were the work of Shakespeare’s or of some other hand.  Throughout the first act his presence lightens on us by flashes, as his voice peals out by fits, from behind or above the too meanly decorated altar of tragic or satiric song:  in the second it is more sensibly continuous; in the third it is all but utterly eclipsed; in the