How would this tale have been told in the eighteenth century by the author of ‘Robinson Crusoe’? by the author of ‘Clarissa Harlowe’? by the author of ‘Tom Jones’? by the author of ‘Tristram Shandy’?  How would it have fared in the nineteenth century if Dickens had been attracted to it, or Thackeray?  How would it be presented now in the twentieth century if it should be chosen again by Mr. Howells or by Mr. James?  We need not ask what Mark Twain would do with it, because he has shown us in the Shepardson-Grangerford episode of ‘Huckleberry Finn’ that he could bring out its inherent romance, even tho he intrusted the telling to the humorous realist who was the son of the town drunkard.  Nor have we to inquire how it would have presented itself to Erckmann-Chatrian, because the Alsatian collaborators made it their own in the somber pages of the ‘Rantzau.’

It is not rash to assume that Defoe would have set up rival shopkeepers, one with a son and the other with a daughter; and he would have delighted in accumulating the minutest details of the daily life of the competing tradesmen.  The fathers would have been sturdy Englishmen, both of them, obstinate and pious; and the preaching of a sound morality would never have been neglected.  The narrative would purport to be truth; and probably it would be credited to the pen of one of the partisans, setting down in the first person a conscientious record of what he had seen with his own eyes.  But if Richardson had wisht to make our ancestors weep at the woes of Romeo and the sad trials of Juliet, he would have abandoned the autobiographic form characteristic of Defoe’s method of approach, for the epistolary, in which the author of ‘Pamela’ felt himself more at ease; and he would have spared us none of the letters of Romeo to Juliet, and of Juliet to Romeo, and of Romeo to Mercutio, and of Juliet to her nurse.  The tenser the tragic gloom, the more voluminous these letters would become, the more self-analytical, and at the same time, the more pathetic.  If Fielding had selected this story as the basis of a prose-epic we should have a masterly structure, perhaps distorted by an undue insistence upon Romeo’s youthful intrigue with Rosaline.  And if Sterne had pretended to play with this tragic tale, he would have given us the married life of Juliet’s parents, with all the humorous whims of old Capulet; and after unending digressions the author might die himself before his heroine was fairly out of the arms of the nurse.

To declare how Dickens might have presented the same theme is not difficult.  The tragedy would sink to tortuous melodrama, and there would be much mystery-mongering, with a careful covering up of dark secrets to be revealed only at an opportune moment.  The large simplicity of the theme would be frittered away, and every opportunity for deliberate pathos would be insisted upon.  Probably Juliet would die in blank verse, disguised as prose.  But Mercutio, altho he would certainly