se humourist who is to Aristophanes as the human
twin-star Castor to Pollux the divine can never have practically
weathered an actual gale; but if I may speak from a single experience of
one which a witness long inured to Indian storm as well as Indian battle
had never seen matched out of the tropics if ever overmatched within
them, I should venture to say, were the poet in question any other mortal
man than Shakespeare, to whom all things were better known by instinct
than ever they can be to others by experience, that the painter of the
storm in _Pericles_ must have shared the adventure and relished the
rapture of such an hour. None other most assuredly than himself alone
could have mingled with the material passion of the elements such human
passion of pathos as thrills in such tenderly sublime undertone of an
agony so nobly subdued through the lament of Pericles over Thaisa. As in
his opening speech of this scene we heard all the clangour and resonance
of warring wind and sea, so now we hear a sound of sacred and spiritual
music as solemn as the central monochord of the inner main itself.

That the three last acts of _Pericles_, with the possible if not over
probable exception of the so-called Chorus, {210} are wholly the work of
Shakespeare in the ripest fullness of his latter genius, is a position
which needs exactly as much proof as does his single-handed authorship of
_Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth_, and _Othello_. In the fifth act is a remarkable
instance of a thing remarkably rare with him; the recast or repetition in
an improved and reinvigorated form of a beautiful image or passage
occurring in a previous play. The now only too famous metaphor of
"patience on a monument smiling at grief"--too famous we might call it
for its own fame--is transfigured as from human beauty to divine, in its
transformation to the comparison of Marina's look with that of "Patience
gazing on kings' graves, and smiling Extremity out of act." A precisely
similar parallel is one to which I have referred elsewhere; that between
the two passages respectively setting forth the reciprocal love of Helena
and Hermia, of Emilia and Flavina. The change of style and spirit in
either case of reiteration is the change from a simpler to a sublimer
form of beauty.

In the two first acts of _Pericles_ there are faint and rare but evident
and positive traces of a passing touch from the hasty hand of
Shakespeare: even here too we may say after Dido:--