fourth it is but very rarely intercepted for a very brief interval in the dark divine service of a darker Commination Day:  in the fifth it predominates generally over the sullen and brooding atmosphere with the fierce imperious glare of a “bloody sun” like that which the wasting shipmen watched at noon “in a hot and copper sky.”  There is here no more to say of a poem inspired at once by the triune Furies of Ezekiel, of Juvenal, and of Dante.

I can imagine no reason but that already suggested why Shakespeare should in a double sense have taken Chaucer for his model or example in leaving half told a story which he had borrowed from the father and master of our narrative poetry.  Among all competent scholars and all rational students of Shakespeare there can have been, except possibly with regard to three of the shorter scenes, no room for doubt or perplexity on any detail of the subject since the perfect summary and the masterly decision of Mr. Dyce.  These three scenes, as no such reader will need to be told or reminded, are the two first soliloquies of the Gaoler’s Daughter after the release of Palamon, and the scene of the portraits, as we may in a double sense call it, in which Emilia, after weighing against each other in solitude the likenesses of the cousins, receives from her own kinsfolk a full and laboured description of their leading champions on either side.  Even setting apart for once and for a moment the sovereign evidence of mere style, we must recognise in this last instance a beautiful and significant example of that loyal and loving fidelity to the minor passing suggestions of Chaucer’s text which on all possible occasions of such comparison so markedly and vividly distinguishes the work of Shakespeare’s from the work of Fletcher’s hand.  Of the pestilent abuse and perversion to which Fletcher has put the perhaps already superfluous hints or sketches by Shakespeare for an episodical underplot, in his transmutation of Palamon’s love-stricken and luckless deliverer into the disgusting burlesque of a mock Ophelia, I have happily no need as I should certainly have no patience to speak. {217}

After the always immitigable gloom of Timon and the sometimes malodorous exhalations of the three preceding plays, it is nothing less than “very heaven” to find and feel ourselves again in the midmost Paradise, the central Eden, of Shakespeare’s divine discovery—­of his last sweet living invention.  Here again is air as pure blowing over fields as fragrant as where Dante saw Matilda or Milton saw Proserpine gathering each as deathless flowers.  We still have here to disentwine or disentangle his own from the weeds of glorious and of other than glorious feature with which Fletcher has thought fit to interweave them; even in the close of the last scene of all we can say to a line, to a letter, where Shakespeare ends and Fletcher begins.  That scene is opened by Shakespeare in his most majestic vein of meditative or moral verse, pointed and coloured