y we never exactly look upon its like
again!

I thought it at one time far from impossible, if not very nearly
probable, that the author of _Arden of Feversham_ might be one with the
author of the famous additional scenes to _The Spanish Tragedy_, and that
either both of these "pieces of work" or neither must be Shakespeare's. I
still adhere to Coleridge's verdict, which indeed must be that of all
judges capable of passing any sentence worthier of record than are

Fancies too weak for boys, too green and idle
For girls of nine:

to the effect that those magnificent passages, wellnigh overcharged at
every point with passion and subtlety, sincerity and instinct of pathetic
truth, are no less like Shakespeare's work than unlike Jonson's: though
hardly perhaps more unlike the typical manner of his adult and matured
style than is the general tone of _The Case is Altered_, his one
surviving comedy of that earlier period in which we know from Henslowe
that the stout-hearted and long struggling young playwright went through
so much theatrical hackwork and piecework in the same rough harness with
other now more or less notable workmen then drudging under the manager's
dull narrow sidelong eye for bare bread and bare shelter. But this
unlikeness, great as it is and serious and singular, between his former
and his latter style in high comedy, gives no warrant for us to believe
him capable of so immeasurable a transformation in tragic style and so
indescribable a decadence in tragic power as would be implied in a
descent from the "fine madness" of "old Jeronymo" to the flat sanity and
smoke-dried sobriety of _Catiline_ and _Sejanus_.--I cannot but think,
too, that Lamb's first hypothetical ascription of these wonderful scenes
to Webster, so much the most Shakespearean in gait and port and accent of
all Shakespeare's liege men-at-arms, was due to a far happier and more
trustworthy instinct than led him in later years to liken them rather to
"the overflowing griefs and talking distraction of Titus Andronicus."

We have wandered it may be somewhat out of the right time into a far
other province of poetry than the golden land of Shakespeare's ripest
harvest-fields of humour. And now, before we may enter the "flowery
square" made by the summer growth of his four greatest works in pure and
perfect comedy "beneath a broad and equal-blowing wind" of all happiest
and most fragrant imagination, we have but one field to cross, one