eir
sister; she them brothers, when they were so indeed." The very crown and
flower of all her father's daughters,--I do not speak here of her human
father, but her divine--the woman above all Shakespeare's women is
Imogen. As in Cleopatra we found the incarnate sex, the woman
everlasting, so in Imogen we find half glorified already the immortal
godhead of womanhood. I would fain have some honey in my words at
parting--with Shakespeare never, but for ever with these notes on
Shakespeare; and I am therefore something more than fain to close my book
upon the name of the woman best beloved in all the world of song and all
the tide of time; upon the name of Shakespeare's Imogen.

APPENDIX.

NOTE ON THE HISTORICAL PLAY OF KING EDWARD III.
1879.

The epitaph of German criticism on Shakespeare was long since written by
the unconscious hand which penned the following sentence; an inscription
worthy of perpetual record on the registers of Gotham or in the daybook
of the yet unstranded Ship of Fools.

"_Thomas Lord Cromwell:--Sir John Oldcastle:--A Yorkshire Tragedy_.--The
three last pieces are not only unquestionably Shakespeare's, but in my
opinion they deserve to be classed among his best and maturest works."

This memorable opinion is the verdict of the modest and judicious Herr
von Schlegel: who had likewise in his day the condescension to inform our
ignorance of the melancholy fact so strangely overlooked by the
contemporaries of Christopher Marlowe, that "his verses are flowing, but
without energy." Strange, but true; too strange, we may reasonably
infer, not to be true. Only to German eyes has the treasure-house of
English poetry ever disclosed a secret of this kind: to German ears alone
has such discord or default been ever perceptible in its harmonies.

Now the facts with regard to this triad of plays are briefly these.
_Thomas Lord Cromwell_ is a piece of such utterly shapeless, spiritless,
bodiless, soulless, senseless, helpless, worthless rubbish, that there is
no known writer of Shakespeare's age to whom it could be ascribed without
the infliction of an unwarrantable insult on that writer's memory. _Sir
John Oldcastle_ is the compound piecework of four minor playwrights, one
of them afterwards and otherwise eminent as a poet--Munday, Drayton,
Wilson, and Hathaway: a thin sample of poetic patchery cobbled up and
stitched together so as to serve its hour for a season without falling to
pieces at