pirit or genius of
creative poetry.

I have one more note to add in passing which touches simply on a musical
point in lyric verse; and from which I would therefore give any biped who
believes that ears "should be long to measure Shakespeare" all timely
warning to avert the length of his own. A very singular question, and
one to me unaccountable except by a supposition which on charitable
grounds I should be loth to entertain for a moment--namely, that such
ears are commoner than I would fain believe on heads externally or
ostensibly human,--has been raised with regard to the first immortal song
of Mariana in the moated grange. This question is whether the second
verse appended by Fletcher to that divine Shakespearean fragment may not
haply have been written by the author of the first. The visible and
audible evidence that it cannot is of a kind which must at once leap into
sight of all human eyes and conviction of all human ears. The metre of
Shakespeare's verse, as written by Shakespeare, is not the metre of
Fletcher's. It can only seem the same to those who hear by finger and
not by ear: a class now at all events but too evidently numerous enough
to refute Sir Hugh's antiquated objection to the once apparently
tautologous phrase of Pistol. {205}

It is of course inexplicable, but it is equally of course undeniable,
that the mention of Shakespeare's _Pericles_ would seem immediately and
invariably to recall to a virtuous critical public of nice and nasty mind
the prose portions of the fourth act, the whole of the prose portions of
the fourth act, and nothing but the prose portions of the fourth act. To
readers and writers of books who readily admit their ineligibility as
members of a Society for the Suppression of Shakespeare or Rabelais, of
Homer or the Bible, it will seem that the third and fifth acts of this
ill-fated and ill-famed play, and with them the poetical parts of the
fourth act, are composed of metal incomparably more attractive. But the
virtuous critic, after the alleged nature of the vulturine kind, would
appear to have eyes and ears and nose for nothing else. It is true that
somewhat more of humour, touched once and again with subtler hints of
deeper truth, is woven into the too realistic weft of these too lifelike
scenes than into any of the corresponding parts in _Measure for Measure_
or in _Troilus and Cressida_; true also that in the hands of imitators,
in hands so much weaker than Shakesp