The manners are everywhere preserved with distinct truth.  The poet and painter are very skilfully played off against one another, both affecting great attention to the other, and each taken up with his own vanity, and the superiority of his own art.  Shakespeare has put into the mouth of the former a very lively description of the genius of poetry and of his own in particular.

          —­A thing slipt idly from me. 
     Our poesy is as a gum, which issues
     From whence ‘tis nourish’d.  The fire i’ th’ flint
     Shows not till it be struck:  our gentle flame
     Provokes itself—­and like the current flies
     Each bound it chafes.

The hollow friendship and shuffling evasions of the Athenian lords, their smooth professions and pitiful ingratitude, are very satisfactorily exposed, as well as the different disguises to which the meanness of self-love resorts in such cases to hide a want of generosity and good faith.  The lurking selfishness of Apemantus does not pass undetected amidst the grossness of his sarcasms and his contempt for the pretensions of others.  Even the two courtezans who accompany Alcibiades to the cave of Timon are very characteristically sketched; and the thieves who come to visit him are also ‘true men’ in their way.—­An exception to this general picture of selfish depravity is found in the old and honest steward, Flavius, to whom Timon pays a full tribute of tenderness.  Shakespeare was unwilling to draw a picture ’all over ugly with hypocrisy’.  He owed this character to the good-natured solicitations of his Muse.  His mind was well said by Ben Jonson to be the ’sphere of humanity’.

The moral sententiousness of this play equals that of Lord Bacon’s Treatise on the Wisdom of the Ancients, and is indeed seasoned with greater variety.  Every topic of contempt or indignation is here exhausted; but while the sordid licentiousness of Apemantus, which turns everything to gall and bitterness, shows only the natural virulence of his temper and antipathy to good or evil alike, Timon does not utter an imprecation without betraying the extravagant workings of disappointed passion, of love altered to hate.  Apemantus sees nothing good in any object, and exaggerates whatever is disgusting:  Timon is tormented with the perpetual contrast between things and appearances, between the fresh, tempting outside and the rottenness within, and invokes mischiefs on the heads of mankind proportioned to the sense of his wrongs and of their treacheries.  He impatiently cries out, when he finds the gold,

     This yellow slave
     Will knit and break religions; bless the accurs’d;
     Make the hoar leprosy ador’d; place thieves,
     And give them title, knee, and approbation,
     With senators on the bench; this is it,
     That makes the wappen’d widow wed again;
     She, whom the spital-house
     Would cast the gorge at, this embalms and spices
     to th’ April day again.