e than his large and solid knowledge, his full and lucid
comprehension at once of the text and of the history of Shakespeare's
plays; and if his research into the inner details of that history may
seem ever to have erred from the straight path of firm and simple
certainty into some dubious byway of theory or conjecture, we may be sure
at least that no lack of learning or devotion, of ardour or intelligence,
but more probably some noble thought that was fathered by a noble wish to
do honour to Shakespeare, has led him to attribute to his original some
quality foreign to the text, or to question the authenticity of what for
love of his author he might not wish to find in it. Thus he would reject
the main part of the fifth act as the work of a mere court laureate, an
official hack or hireling employed to anoint the memory of an archbishop
and lubricate the steps of a throne with the common oil of dramatic
adulation; and finding it in either case a task alike unworthy of
Shakespeare to glorify the name of Cranmer or to deify the names of the
queen then dead and the king yet living, it is but natural that he should
be induced by an unconscious bias or prepossession of the will to
depreciate the worth of the verse sent on work fitter for ushers and
embalmers and the general valetry or varletry of Church and State. That
this fifth act is unequal in point of interest to the better part of the
preceding acts with which it is connected by so light and loose a tie of
convenience is as indisputable as that the style of the last scene
savours now and then, and for some space together, more strongly than
ever of Fletcher's most especial and distinctive qualities, or that the
whole structure of the play if judged by any strict rule of pure art is
incomposite and incongruous, wanting in unity, consistency, and coherence
of interest. The fact is that here even more than in _King John_ the
poet's hands were hampered by a difficulty inherent in the subject. To
an English and Protestant audience, fresh from the passions and perils of
reformation and reaction, he had to present an English king at war with
the papacy, in whom the assertion of national independence was incarnate;
and to the sympathies of such an audience it was a matter of mere
necessity for him to commend the representative champion of their cause
by all means which he could compel into the service of his aim. Yet this
object was in both instances all but incompatible with