poor wretch with "an intense love of his country," intended to "redeem him in the hearts of the audience" in spite of the fact that "even in this love there is something feminine and personal." There is nothing else in it: as anybody but Coleridge would have seen. It is exquisitely pretty and utterly unimaginable as the utterance of a man. The two men who support him on either side, the loyal priest and the gallant kinsman, offer him words of manly counsel and manful cheer. He answers them with an outbreak of such magnificent poetry as might almost have been uttered by the divine and unknown and unimaginable poet who gave to eternity the Book of Job: but in this case also the futility of intelligence is as perfect as the sublimity of speech. And his utter collapse on the arrival of bad tidings provokes a counterchange of poetry as splendid in utterance of abjection and despair as the preceding rhapsody in expression of confidence and pride. The scene is still rather amœbæan than dramatic: it is above the reach of Euripides, but more like the imaginable work of a dramatic and tragic Theocritus than the possible work of a Sophocles when content to give us nothing more nearly perfect and more comparatively sublime than the Trachiniæ. And it is even more amusing than curious that the courtly censors who cancelled and suppressed the scene of Richard's deposition should not have cut away the glorious passage in which the vanity of kingship is confronted, by the grovelling repentance of a king, with the grinning humiliation of death. The dramatic passion of this second great speech is as unmistakable as the lyric emotion of the other. And the utter collapse of heart and spirit which follows on the final stroke of bad tidings at once completes the picture of the man, and concludes in equal harmony the finest passage of the poem and the most memorable scene in the play.

The effect of the impression made by it is so elaborately sustained in the following scene as almost to make a young student wonder at the interest taken by the young Shakespeare in the development or evolution of such a womanish or semivirile character. The style is not exactly verbose, as we can hardly deny that it is

in the less passionate parts of the second and third acts of King John: but it is exuberant and effusive, elegiac and Ovidian, in a degree which might well have made his admirers doubt, and gravely doubt, whether the future author of Othello would ever be competent to take and hold his place beside the actual author of Faustus. Marlowe did not spend a tithe of the words or a tithe of the pains on the presentation of a character neither more worthy of contempt nor less worthy of compassion. And his Edward is at least as living and convincing, as tragic and pathetic, a figure as Shakespeare's Richard.

The garden scene which closes this memorable third act is a very pretty eclogue, not untouched with tragic rather than idyllic emotion. The fourth act opens upon a morally chaotic introduction of incongruous causes, inexplicable plaintiffs, and incomprehensible defendants. Whether Aumerle or Fitzwater or Surrey or Bagot is right or wrong, honorable or villainous, no reader or spectator is given a chance of guessing: it is a mere cockpit squabble. And the scene of deposition which follows, full as it is of graceful and beautiful writing, need only be set against the scene of deposition in Edward the Second to show the difference between rhetorical and dramatic poetry, emotion and passion, eloquence and tragedy, literature and life. The young Shakespeare's scene is full to superfluity of fine verses and fine passages: his young compeer's or master's is from end to end one magnificent model of tragedy, "simple, sensuous, and passionate as Milton himself could have desired: Milton, the second as Shakespeare was the first, of the great English poets who were pupils and debtors of Christopher Marlowe. It is pure poetry and perfect drama: the fancy is finer and the action more lifelike than here. Only once or twice do we come upon such a line as this in the pathetic but exuberant garrulity of Richard:-" While that my wretchedness doth bait myself." That is worthy of Marlowe. And what follows is certainly pathetic: though certainly there is a good deal of it.

The last act might rather severely than unfairly be described as a series of six tragic or tragicomic eclogues. The first

scene is so lovely that no reader worthy to enjoy it will care to ask whether it is or is not so lifelike as to convey no less of conviction than all readers must feel of fascination in the continuous and faultless melody of utterance and tenderness of fancy which make it in its way an incomparable idyl. From the dramatic point of view it might certainly be objected that we know nothing of the wife, and that what we know of the husband does not by any means tend to explain the sudden pathos and sentimental sympathy of their parting speeches. The first part of the next scene is as beautiful and blameless an example of dramatic narrative as even a Greek poet could have given at such length: but in the latter part of it we cannot but see and acknowledge again the dramatic immaturity of the poet who in a very few years was to reveal himself as beyond all question, except from the most abject and impudent of dunces, the greatest imaginable dramatist or creator ever born into immortality. Style and metre are rough, loose, and weak: the dotage of York becomes lunacy. Sa folie en furie est tournée. The scene in which he clamors for the blood of his son is not in any proper sense tragic or dramatic: it is a very ugly eclogue, artificial in manner and unnatural in substance. No feebler or unlovelier example exists of those "jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits" which Marlowe's imperial rebuke should already have withered into silence on the lips of the veriest Marsyas among all the amœbæan rhymesters of his voluble and effervescent generation.

The better nature of the young Shakespeare revives in the closing scenes: though Exton is a rather insufficient ruffian for the part of so important an assassin. We might at least have seen or heard of him before he suddenly chips the shell as a full-fledged murderer. The last soliloquy of the king is wonderful in its way, and beautiful from any point of view it shows once more the influence of Marlowe's example in the curious trick of selection and transcription of texts for sceptic meditation and analytic dissection. But we see rather more of the poet and less of his creature the man than Marlowe might have given us. The interlude of the groom, on the other hand,

gives promise of something different in power and pathos from the poetry of Marlowe: but the scene of slaughter which follows is not quite satisfactory: it is almost boyish in its impetuosity of buffeting and bloodshed. The last scene, with its final reversion to rhyme, may be described in Richard's own previous words as good, "and yet not greatly good."

Of the three lines on which the greatest genius that ever made earth more splendid, and the name of man more glorious, than without the passage of its presence they could have been, chose alternately or successively to work, the line of tragedy was that on which its promise or assurance of future supremacy was first made manifest. The earliest comedies of Shakespeare, overflowing with fancies and exuberant in beauties as they are, gave no sign of inimitable power: their joyous humor and their sunbright poetry were charming rather than promising qualities. The imperfections of his first historic play, on which I trust I have not touched with any semblance of even the most unwilling or unconscious irreverence, are surely more serious, more obvious, more obtrusive, than the doubtless undeniable and indisputable imperfections of Romeo and Juliet. If the style of love-making in that loveliest of all youthful poems is fantastically unlike the actual courtship of modern lovers, it is not unliker than is the style of lovemaking in favor with Dante and his fellow-poets of juvenile and fanciful passion. Setting aside this objection, the first of Shakespeare's tragedies is not more beautiful than blameless. There is no incoherence of character, no inconsistency of action. Aumerle is hardly so living a figure as Tybalt: Capulet is as indisputably probable as York is obviously impossible in the part of a headstrong tyrant. There is little feminine interest in the earliest comedies: there is less in the first history. In the first tragedy there is nothing else, or nothing but what is so subservient and subordinate as simply to bring it out and throw it into relief. In the work of a young poet this difference would or should be enough to establish and explain the fact that though he might be greater than all other men in history and comedy, he was still greater in tragedy.

T

HE white-haired couple stood at the limestone horse-block and strained their dim eyes down the elm-arched village street in the direction of a rapidly vanishing carriage. As the vehicle turned a distant corner, a girl within leaned forward and eagerly waved a bit of white. The man at the horseblock remained motionless, for seventy is not twenty; but the woman returned the farewell with a faltering flutter of her own damp handkerchief, and, as the carriage disappeared, bit her trembling lips. Then the aged couple returned to the yard, carefully closed the gate behind them, passed slowly down an aster-bordered walk, paused uncertainly on the oldfashioned piazza with the phoebe's nest in one corner, and entered the house.

In the parlor the subtle odor of wellgroomed humanity still hung in the air, calling to mind satiny skins, lace handkerchiefs, and perfumed coils of hair. The floral decorations were already beginning to fade; bruised petals littered the floor, and among these lay a single white rose. It had fallen from the bride's cluster, and chanced to mark the very spot where she had publicly resigned her maidenhood, leaving father and mother to cleave to the man of her choice.

Four other sisters before her had done the same thing, in the same room, on almost the same spot. But she was the last of the brood of tender fledglings; the nest was now empty; and Mrs. Madison suddenly sank upon a sofa and softly began to cry. Old Ferdinand said nothing for the moment. Finally, though, he sat down beside her.

"Well, now, mother, I don't know as I'd cry," he ventured, cheerfully.

"You don't know what you would do,

VOL. CVI

No. DCXXXVI

W

ITHOUT being absolutely unique, the position occupied by King John among the historical plays of Shakespeare is distinct and noteworthy. Animated, it may be supposed, by a design to depict in dramatic shape the history of England during those reigns with which, in view of national sympathies and queenly prej udices, it was judicious or safe to deal, Shakespeare began, in imitation of and partly, it is held, in association with Christopher Marlowe, the series of historical plays which occupied ten years of his life, and bridged over in a sense the period in which he concerned himself with comedies and with

Such sights as youthful poets dream On summer-eves by haunted stream, and that in which he dealt with the deepest mysteries of passion and the gravest problems of existence. Exact evidence of the date of many of the plays is not forthcoming, and though for a century and a half the best critical intellect has occupied itself with the production of testimony, internal and external, of circumstances of composition and production, much has to be taken on trust, and more remains conjecture. By the decision of authorities not yet dis

placed it has to be assumed that the earliest of the historical plays is to be assigned to 1594. As to the share of Shakespeare in Marlowe's Edward III. on which Mr. Fleay insists, which had previously been advanced by Capell and Halliwell-Phillipps, which wins the acceptance of Dr. Brandes and is scouted by Mr. Swinburne, as on other points of asserted collaboration by Shakespeare, it is inexpedient and superfluous to dwell when dealing with a single drama the authorship of which is undisputed. Richard III., in a sense the final play of the historical series, since, apart from the question of authorship, Henry VIII. comes into another category, is supposed to be the first in order of composition, and is followed, with no long interval, by Richard II. The three parts of Henry VI. are, in fact, anterior, belonging to 1592. Shakespeare's share in them is, however, neither large nor absolutely defined. and the opinion generally accepted is that it did not extend beyond revision and additions.

King John is assigned by Dr. Sidney Lee to 1594, and by Mr. Fleay to 1596, the latter date winning the more general acceptance. One certainty, and one alone, exists. It is mentioned for the first time in the Palladis Tamia of

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