eare's as were Heywood's or
Davenport's (who transplanted this unlovely episode from _Pericles_ into
a play of his own), these very scenes or such as they reappear unredeemed
by any such relief in all the rank and rampant ugliness of their raw
repulsive realism: true, again, that Fletcher has once equalled them in
audacity, while stripping off the nakedness of his subject the last
ragged and rude pretence at a moral purpose, and investing it instead
with his very brightest robe of gay parti-coloured humour: but after all
it remains equally true that to senses less susceptible of attraction by
carrion than belong to the vultures of critical and professional virtue
they must always remain as they have always been, something very
considerably more than unattractive. I at least for one must confess
myself insufficiently virtuous to have ever at any time for any moment
felt towards them the very slightest touch of any feeling more attractive
than repulsion. And herewith I hasten to wash my hands of the only
unattractive matter in the only three of Shakespeare's plays which offer
any such matter to the perceptions of any healthy-minded and reasonable
human creature.

But what now shall I say that may not be too pitifully unworthy of the
glories and the beauties, the unsurpassable pathos and sublimity inwoven
with the imperial texture of this very play? the blood-red Tyrian purple
of tragic maternal jealousy which might seem to array it in a worthy
attire of its Tyrian name; the flower-soft loveliness of maiden
lamentation over the flower-strewn seaside grave of Marina's old
sea-tossed nurse, where I am unvirtuous enough (as virtue goes among
moralists) to feel more at home and better at ease than in the atmosphere
of her later lodging in Mitylene? What, above all, shall be said of that
storm above all storms ever raised in poetry, which ushered into a world
of such wonders and strange chances the daughter of the wave-worn and
world-wandering prince of Tyre? Nothing but this perhaps, that it
stands--or rather let me say that it blows and sounds and shines and
rings and thunders and lightens as far ahead of all others as the
burlesque sea-storm of Rabelais beyond all possible storms of comedy. The
recent compiler of a most admirably skilful and most delicately
invaluable compendium of Pantagruel or manual by way of guidebook to
Rabelais has but too justly taken note of the irrefragable evidence there
given that the one pro