is as good of its kind as anything between Aristophanes and Horace Smith.  Indeed, it may remind us of that parody on the soft, superfluous, flowery and frothy style of Agathon, which at the opening of the Thesmophoriazusae cannot but make the youngest and most ignorant reader laugh, though the oldest and most learned has never set eyes on a line of the original verses which supplied the incarnate god of comic song with matter for such exquisite burlesque.

To the speech above cited the reply of the Countess is even gracefuller, and closer to the same general model of fanciful elegiac dialogue:—­

   Let not thy presence, like the April sun,
   Flatter our earth, and suddenly be done: 
   More happy do not make our outward wall
   Than thou wilt grace our inward house withal. 
   Our house, my liege, is like a country swain,
   Whose habit rude, and manners blunt and plain. 
   Presageth naught; yet inly beautified
   With bounty’s riches, and fair hidden pride;
   For where the golden ore doth buried lie,
   The ground, undecked with nature’s tapestry,
   Seems barren, sere, unfertile, fruitless, dry;
   And where the upper turf of earth doth boast
   His pride, perfumes, {239} and particoloured cost,
   Delve there, and find this issue and their pride
   To spring from ordure and corruption’s side. 
   But, to make up my all too long compare,
   These ragged walls no testimony are
   What is within; but, like a cloak, doth hide
   From weather’s waste the under garnished pride. 
   More gracious than my terms can let thee be,
   Entreat thyself to stay awhile with me.

Not only the exquisite grace of this charming last couplet, but the smooth sound strength, the fluency and clarity of the whole passage, may serve to show that the original suggestion of Capell, if (as I think) untenable, was not (we must admit) unpardonable.  The very oversight perceptible to any eye and painful to any ear not sealed up by stepdame nature from all perception of pleasure or of pain derivable from good verse or bad—­the reckless reiteration of the same rhyme with but one poor couplet intervening—­suggests rather the oversight of an unfledged poet than the obtuseness of a full-grown poeticule or poetaster.

But of how many among the servile or semi-servile throng of imitators in every generation may not as much as this be said by tolerant or kindly judges!  Among the herd of such diminutives as swarm after the heel or fawn upon the hand of Mr. Tennyson, more than one, more than two or three, have come as close as his poor little viceregal or vice-imperial parasite to the very touch and action of the master’s hand which feeds them unawares from his platter as they fawn; as close as this nameless and short-winded satellite to the gesture and the stroke of Shakespeare’s.  For this also must be noted; that the resemblance here is but of stray words, of single lines, of separable passages.  The whole tone of the text, the whole build of the play, the whole scheme of the poem, is far enough from any such resemblance.  The structure, the composition, is feeble, incongruous, inadequate, effete.  Any student will remark at a first glance what a short-breathed runner, what a broken-winded athlete in the lists of tragic verse, is the indiscoverable author of this play.