e authority of
Lamb, is indeed as like the manner of Shakespeare as it can be--to eyes
ignorant of what his fellows can do; but it is not like the manner of the
Shakespeare who wrote _Othello_. This, however, is beside the question.
It is very like the Shakespeare who wrote the _Comedy of Errors--Love's
Labour's Lost--Romeo and Juliet_. It is so like that had we fallen upon
it in any of these plays it would long since have been a household word
in all men's mouths for sweetness, truth, simplicity, perfect and
instinctive accuracy of touch. It is very much liker the first manner of
Shakespeare than any passage in _King Edward III_. And no Sham
Shakespearean critic that I know of has yet assigned to the hapless
object of his howling homage the authorship of _Green's Tu Quoque_.

Returning to our text, we find in the short speech of the King with which
the first act is wound up yet another couplet which has the very ring in
it of Shakespeare's early notes--the catch at words rather than play on
words which his tripping tongue in youth could never resist:

Countess, albeit my business urgeth me,
It shall attend while I attend on thee.

And with this pretty little instance of courtly and courteous euphuism we
pass from the first to the second and most important act in the play.

Any reader well versed in the text of Shakespeare, and ill versed in the
work of his early rivals and his later pupils, might surely be forgiven
if on a first reading of the speech with which this act opens he should
cry out with Capell that here at least was the unformed hand of the
Master perceptible and verifiable indeed. The writer, he might say, has
the very glance of his eye, the very trick of his gait, the very note of
his accent. But on getting a little more knowledge, such a reader will
find the use of it in the perception to which he will have attained that
in his early plays, as in his two early poems, the style of Shakespeare
was not for the most part distinctively his own. It was that of a crew,
a knot of young writers, among whom he found at once both leaders and
followers to be guided and to guide. A mere glance into the rich lyric
literature of the period will suffice to show the dullest eye and teach
the densest ear how nearly innumerable were the Englishmen of Elizabeth's
time who could sing in the courtly or pastoral key of the season, each
man of them a few notes of his own, simple or fantastic, but all sweet,
cle