Nec tam aversus equos Tyria sol jungit ab urbe.

It has been said that those most unmistakable verses on "the blind mole"
are not such as any man could insert into another man's work, or slip in
between the lines of an inferior poet: and that they occur naturally
enough in a speech of no particular excellence. I take leave decisively
to question the former assertion, and flatly to contradict the latter.
The pathetic and magnificent lines in dispute do not occur naturally
enough, or at all naturally, among the very poor, flat, creeping verses
between which they have been thrust with such over freehanded
recklessness. No purple patch was ever more pitifully out of place.
There is indeed no second example of such wanton and wayward liberality;
but the generally lean and barren style of these opening acts does not
crawl throughout on exactly the same low level.

The last of the only three plays with which I venture to find any fault
on the score of moral taste is the first on my list of the only three
plays belonging to this last period on which, as they now stand, I trace
the indisputable track of another touch than Shakespeare's. But in the
two cases remaining our general task of distinction should on the whole
be simple and easy enough for the veriest babes and sucklings in the
lower school of Shakespeare.

That the two great posthumous fragments we possess of Shakespeare's
uncompleted work are incomplete simply because the labour spent on either
was cut short by his timeless death is the first natural assumption of
any student with an eye quick enough to catch the point where the traces
of his hand break off; but I should now be inclined to guess rather that
on reconsideration of the subjects chosen he had rejected or dismissed
them for a time at least as unfit for dramatic handling. It could have
needed no great expenditure of reasoning or reflection to convince a man
of lesser mind and less experience than Shakespeare's that no subject
could possibly be more unmanageable, more indomitably improper for such a
purpose, than he had selected in _Timon of Athens_. How he came ever to
fall across such a subject, to hit upon such a choice, we can spend no
profitable time or pains in trying to conjecture. It is clear, however,
that at all events there was a season when the inexplicable attraction of
it was too strong for him to resist the singular temptation to embody in
palpable form, to array in dramatic raime