nt, to invest with imaginative
magnificence, the godless ascetic passion of misanthropy, the martyrdom
of an atheistic Stylites. Timon is doubtless a man of far nobler type
than any monomaniac of the tribe of Macarius: but his immeasurable
superiority in spiritual rank to the hermit fathers of the desert serves
merely to make him a thought madder and a grain more miserable than the
whole Thebaid of Christomaniacs rolled into one. Foolish and fruitless
as it has ever been to hunt through Shakespeare's plays and sonnets on
the false scent of a fantastic trail, to put thaumaturgic trust in a dark
dream of tracking his untraceable personality through labyrinthine byways
of life and visionary crossroads of character, it is yet surely no blind
assumption to accept the plain evidence in both so patent before us, that
he too like other men had his dark seasons of outer or of inner life, and
like other poets found them or made them fruitful as well as bitter,
though it might be but of bitter fruit. And of such there is here enough
to glut the gorge of all the monks in monkery, or strengthen for a forty
days' fast any brutallest unwashed theomaniac of the Thebaid. The most
unconscionably unclean of all foul-minded fanatics might have been
satisfied with the application to all women from his mother upwards of
the monstrous and magnificent obloquy found by Timon as insufficient to
overwhelm as his gold was inadequate to satisfy one insatiable and
indomitable "brace of harlots." In _Troilus and Cressida_ we found too
much that Swift might have written when half inspired by the genius of
Shakespeare; in the great and terrible fourth act of _Timon_ we find such
tragedy as Juvenal might have written when half deified by the spirit of
AEschylus.

There is a noticeable difference between the case of _Timon_ and the two
other cases (diverse enough between themselves) of late or mature work
but partially assignable to the hand of Shakespeare. In _Pericles_ we
may know exactly how much was added by Shakespeare to the work of we know
not whom; in _The Two Noble Kinsmen_ we can tell sometimes to a hair's
breadth in a hemistich by whom how much was added to the posthumous text
of Shakespeare; in _Timon_ we cannot assert with the same confidence in
the same accuracy that just so many scenes and no more, just so many
speeches and none other, were the work of Shakespeare's or of some other
hand. Throughout the first act his presence lighten