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By Root 20820 0

scene of the first act the impotent imitation of Marlowe is pitifully patent. Possibly there may also be an imitation of the still imitative style of Shakespeare, and the style may be more accurately definable as a copy of a copy—a study after the manner of Marlowe, not at second hand, but at third. In any case, being obviously too flat and feeble to show a touch of either godlike hand, this scene may be set aside at once to make way for the second.

The second scene is more animated, but low in style till we come to the outbreak of rhyme. In other words, the energetic or active part is at best passable—fluent and decent commonplace: but where the style turns undramatic and runs into mere elegiacs, a likeness becomes perceptible to the first elegiac style of Shakespeare. Witness these lines spoken by the King in contemplation of the Countess of Salisbury’s beauty, while yet struggling against the nascent motions of a base love:—

Now in the sun alone it doth not lie

With light to take light from a mortal eye:

For here two day-stars that mine eyes would see

More than the sun steal mine own light from me.

Contemplative desire! desire to be

In contemplation that may master thee!

Decipit exemplar vitiis imitabile: if Shakespeare ever saw or heard these pretty lines, he should have felt the unconscious rebuke implied in such close and facile imitation of his own early elegiacs. As a serious mimicry of his first manner, a critical parody summing up in little space the sweet faults of his poetic nonage, with its barren overgrowth of unprofitable flowers,—bright point, soft metaphor, and sweet elaborate antithesis—this is as good of its kind as anything between Aristophanes and Horace Smith. Indeed, it may remind us of that parody on the soft, superfluous, flowery and frothy style of Agathon, which at the opening of the Thesmophoriazusæ cannot but make the youngest and most ignorant reader laugh, though the oldest and most learned has never set eyes on a line of the original verses which supplied the incarnate god of comic song with matter for such exquisite burlesque.

To the speech above cited the reply of the Countess is even gracefuller, and closer to the same general model of fanciful elegiac dialogue:—

Let not thy presence, like the April sun,

Flatter our earth, and suddenly be done:

More happy do not make our outward wall

Than thou wilt grace our inward house withal.

Our house, my liege, is like a country swain,

Whose habit rude, and manners blunt and plain.

Presageth naught; yet inly beautified

With bounty’s riches, and fair hidden pride;

For where the golden ore doth buried lie,

The ground, undecked with nature’s tapestry,

Seems barren, sere, unfertile, fruitless, dry;

And where the upper turf of earth doth boast

His pride, perfumes, and particoloured cost,

Delve there, and find this issue and their pride

To spring from ordure and corruption’s side.

But, to make up my all too long compare,

These ragged walls no testimony are

What is within; but, like a cloak, doth hide

From weather’s waste the under garnished pride.

More gracious than my terms can let thee be,

Entreat thyself to stay awhile with me.

Not only the exquisite grace of this charming last couplet, but the smooth sound strength, the fluency and clarity of the whole passage, may serve to show that the original suggestion of Capell, if (as I think) untenable, was not (we must admit) unpardonable. The very oversight perceptible to any eye and painful to any ear not sealed up by stepdame nature from all perception of pleasure or of pain derivable from good verse or bad—the reckless reiteration of the same rhyme with but one poor couplet intervening—suggests rather the oversight of an unfledged poet than the obtuseness of a full-grown poeticule or poetaster.

But of how many among the servile or semi-servile throng of imitators in every generation may not as much as this be said by tolerant or kindly judges! Among the herd of such diminutives as swarm after the heel or fawn upon the hand of Mr. Tennyson, more than one, more than two or three,