mitators in
every generation may not as much as this be said by tolerant or kindly
judges! Among the herd of such diminutives as swarm after the heel or
fawn upon the hand of Mr. Tennyson, more than one, more than two or
three, have come as close as his poor little viceregal or vice-imperial
parasite to the very touch and action of the master's hand which feeds
them unawares from his platter as they fawn; as close as this nameless
and short-winded satellite to the gesture and the stroke of
Shakespeare's. For this also must be noted; that the resemblance here is
but of stray words, of single lines, of separable passages. The whole
tone of the text, the whole build of the play, the whole scheme of the
poem, is far enough from any such resemblance. The structure, the
composition, is feeble, incongruous, inadequate, effete. Any student
will remark at a first glance what a short-breathed runner, what a broken-
winded athlete in the lists of tragic verse, is the indiscoverable author
of this play.

There is another point which the Neo-Shakespearean synagogue will by no
man be expected to appreciate; for to apprehend it requires some
knowledge and some understanding of the poetry of the Shakespearean
age--so surely we now should call it, rather than Elizabethan or
Jacobean, for the sake of verbal convenience, if not for the sake of
literary decency; and such knowledge or understanding no sane man will
expect to find in any such quarter. Even in the broad coarse comedy of
the period we find here and there the same sweet and simple echoes of the
very cradle-song (so to call it) of our drama: so like Shakespeare, they
might say who knew nothing of Shakespeare's fellows, that we cannot
choose but recognise his hand. Here as always first in the field--the
genuine and golden harvest-field of Shakespearean criticism, Charles Lamb
has cited a passage from _Green's Tu Quoque_--a comedy miserably
misreprinted in Dodsley's Old Plays--on which he observes that "this is
so like Shakespeare, that we seem to remember it," being as it is a
girl's gentle lamentation over the selfish, exacting, suspicious and
trustless love of man, as contrasted with the swift simple surrender of a
woman's love at the first heartfelt appeal to her pity--"we seem to
remember it," says Lamb, as a speech of Desdemona uttered on a first
perception or suspicion of jealousy or alienation in Othello. This
lovely passage, if I dare say so in contravention to th