Any reader well versed in the text of Shakespeare, and ill versed in the work of his early rivals and his later pupils, might surely be forgiven if on a first reading of the speech with which this act opens he should cry out with Capell that here at least was the unformed hand of the Master perceptible and verifiable indeed.  The writer, he might say, has the very glance of his eye, the very trick of his gait, the very note of his accent.  But on getting a little more knowledge, such a reader will find the use of it in the perception to which he will have attained that in his early plays, as in his two early poems, the style of Shakespeare was not for the most part distinctively his own.  It was that of a crew, a knot of young writers, among whom he found at once both leaders and followers to be guided and to guide.  A mere glance into the rich lyric literature of the period will suffice to show the dullest eye and teach the densest ear how nearly innumerable were the Englishmen of Elizabeth’s time who could sing in the courtly or pastoral key of the season, each man of them a few notes of his own, simple or fantastic, but all sweet, clear, genuine of their kind:—­

         Facies non omnibus una,
   Nec diversa tamen: 

and yet so close is the generic likeness between flower and flower of the same lyrical garden that the first half of the quotation seems but half applicable here.  In Bird’s, Morley’s, Dowland’s collections of music with the words appended—­in such jewelled volumes as England’s Helicon and Davison’s Poetical Rhapsody—­their name is Legion, their numbers are numberless.  You cannot call them imitators, this man of that, or all of any; they were all of one school, but it was a school without a master or a head.  And even so it was with the earliest sect or gathering of dramatic writers in England.  Marlowe alone stood apart and above them all—­the young Shakespeare among the rest; but among these we cannot count, we cannot guess, how many were wellnigh as competent as he to continue the fluent rhyme, to prolong the facile echo, of Greene and Peele, their first and most famous leaders.

No more docile or capable pupil could have been desired by any master in any art than the author of David and Bethsabe has found in the writer of this second act.  He has indeed surpassed his model, if not in grace and sweetness, yet in taste or tact of expression, in continuity and equality of style.  Vigour is not the principal note of his manner, but compared with the soft effusive ebullience of his master’s we may fairly call it vigorous and condensed.  But all this merit or demerit is matter of mere language only.  The poet—­a very pretty poet in his way, and doubtless capable of gracious work enough in the idyllic or elegiac line of business—­shows about as much capacity to grasp and handle the fine intimacies of character and the large issues of circumstance to any tragic or dramatic purpose, as might be expected