Timon of Athens always appeared to us to be written with as intense a feeling of his subject as any one play of Shakespeare.  It is one of the few in which he seems to be in earnest throughout, never to trifle nor go out of his way.  He does not relax in his efforts, nor lose sight of the unity of his design.  It is the only play of our author in which spleen is the predominant feeling of the mind.  It is as much a satire as a play:  and contains some of the finest pieces of invective possible to be conceived, both in the snarling, captious answers of the cynic Apemantus, and in the impassioned and more terrible imprecations of Timon.  The latter remind the classical reader of the force and swelling impetuosity of the moral declamations in Juvenal, while the former have all the keenness and caustic severity of the old Stoic philosophers.  The soul of Diogenes appears to have been seated on the lips of Apemantus.  The churlish profession of misanthropy in the cynic is contrasted with the profound feeling of it in Timon, and also with the soldierlike and determined resentment of Alcibiades against his countrymen, who have banished him, though this forms only an incidental episode in the tragedy.

The fable consists of a single event—­of the transition from the highest pomp and profusion of artificial refinement to the most abject state of savage life, and privation of all social intercourse.  The change is as rapid as it is complete; nor is the description of the rich and generous Timon, banqueting in gilded palaces, pampered by every luxury, prodigal of his hospitality, courted by crowds of flatterers, poets, painters, lords, ladies, who: 

     Follow his strides, his lobbies fill with tendance,
     Rain sacrificial whisperings in his ear;
     And through him drink the free air—­

more striking than that of the sudden falling off of his friends and fortune, and his naked exposure in a wild forest digging roots from the earth for his sustenance, with a lofty spirit of self-denial, and bitter scorn of the world, which raise him higher in our esteem than the dazzling gloss of prosperity could do.  He grudges himself the means of life, and is only busy in preparing his grave.  How forcibly is the difference between what he was and what he is described in Apemantus’s taunting questions, when he comes to reproach him with the change in his way of life!

          —­What, think’st thou,
     That the bleak air, thy boisterous chamberlain,
     Will put thy shirt on warm? will these moist trees
     That have out-liv’d the eagle, page thy heels,
     And skip when thou point’st out? will the cold brook,
     Candied with ice, caudle thy morning taste
     To cure thy o’er-night’s surfeit?  Call the creatures,
     Whose naked natures live in all the spight
     Of wreakful heav’n, whose bare unhoused trunks,
     To the conflicting elements expos’d,
     Answer mere nature, bid them flatter thee.