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By Root 19466 0

that Shakespeare as he wrote had in mind his own dead little son still fresh and living at his heart can hardly add more than a touch of additional tenderness to our perfect and piteous delight in him. And even in her daughter’s embrace it seems hard if his mother should have utterly forgotten the little voice that had only time to tell her just eight words of that ghost story which neither she nor we were ever to hear ended. Any one but Shakespeare would have sought to make pathetic profit out of the child by the easy means of showing him if but once again as changed and stricken to the death for want of his mother and fear for her and hunger and thirst at his little high heart for the sight and touch of her: Shakespeare only could find a better way, a subtler and a deeper chord to strike, by giving us our last glimpse of him as he laughed and chattered with her “past enduring,” to the shameful neglect of those ladies in the natural blueness of whose eyebrows as well as their noses he so stoutly declined to believe. And at the very end (as aforesaid) it may be that we remember him all the better because the father whose jealousy killed him and the mother for love of whom he died would seem to have forgotten the little brave sweet spirit with all its truth of love and tender sense of shame as perfectly and unpardonably as Shakespeare himself at the close of King Lear would seem to have forgotten one who never had forgotten Cordelia.

But yet—and here for once the phrase abhorred by Cleopatra does not “allay the good” but only the bad “precedence”—if ever amends could be made for such unnatural show of seeming forgetfulness (“out on the seeming! I will write against it”—or would, had I not written enough already), the poet most assuredly has made such amends here. At the sunrise of Perdita beside Florizel it seems as if the snows of sixteen winters had melted all together into the splendour of one unutterable spring. They “smell April and May” in a sweeter sense than it could be said of “young Master Fenton”: “nay, which is more,” as his friend and champion Mistress Quickly might have added to mine host’s commendatory remark, they speak all April and May; because April is in him as naturally as May in her, by just so many years’ difference before the Mayday of her birth as went to make up her dead brother’s little lot of living breath, which in Beaumont’s most lovely and Shakespeare-worthy phrase “was not a life; was but a piece of childhood thrown away.” Nor can I be content to find no word of old affection for Autolycus, who lived, as we may not doubt, though but a hint or promise be vouchsafed us for all assurance that he lived by favour of his “good masters” once more to serve Prince Florizel and wear three-pile for as much of his time as it might please him to put on “robes” like theirs that were “gentlemen born,” and had “been so any time these four hours.” And yet another and a graver word must be given with all reverence to the “grave and good Paulina,” whose glorious fire of godlike indignation was as warmth and cordial to the innermost heart while yet bruised and wrung for the yet fresh loss of Mamillius.

The time is wellnigh come now for me to consecrate in this book my good will if not good work to the threefold and thrice happy memory of the three who have written of Shakespeare as never man wrote, nor ever man may write again; to the everlasting praise and honour and glory of Charles Lamb, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Walter Savage Landor; “wishing,” I hardly dare to say, “what I write may be read by their light.” The play of plays, which is Cymbeline, remains alone to receive the last salute of all my love.

I think, as far as I can tell, I may say I have always loved this one beyond all other children of Shakespeare. The too literal egoism of this profession will not be attributed by any candid or even commonly honest reader to the violence of vanity so much more than comical as to make me suppose that such a record or assurance could in itself be matter of interest to any man: but simply to the real and