ll my poor soul, and my poor soul me.

Once more, this last couplet is very much in the style of Shakespeare's
sonnets; nor is it wholly unlike even the dramatic style of Shakespeare
in his youth--and some dozen other poets or poeticules of the time. But
throughout this part of the play the recurrence of a faint and
intermittent resemblance to Shakespeare is more frequently noticeable
than elsewhere. {252} A student of imperfect memory but not of defective
intuition might pardonably assign such couplets, on hearing them cited,
to the master-hand itself; but such a student would be likelier to refer
them to the sonnetteer than to the dramatist. And a casual likeness to
the style of Shakespeare's sonnets is not exactly sufficient evidence to
warrant such an otherwise unwarrantable addition of appendage to the list
of Shakespeare's plays.

A little further on we come upon the first and last passage which does
actually recall by its wording a famous instance of the full and ripened
style of Shakespeare.

He that doth clip or counterfeit your stamp
Shall die, my lord: and will your sacred self
Commit high treason 'gainst the King of heaven,
To stamp his image in forbidden metal,
Forgetting your allegiance and your oath?
In violating marriage' sacred law
You break a greater honour than yourself;
To be a king is of a younger house
Than to be married: your progenitor,
Sole reigning Adam on the universe,
By God was honoured for a married man,
But not by him anointed for a king.

Every possible reader, I suppose, will at once bethink himself of the
famous passage in _Measure for Measure_ which here may seem to be faintly
prefigured:

It were as good
To pardon him that hath from nature stolen
A man already made, as to remit
Their saucy sweetness, that do coin heaven's image
In stamps that are forbid:

and the very difference of style is not wider than the gulf which gapes
between the first style of Shakespeare and the last. But men of
Shakespeare's stamp, I venture to think, do not thus repeat themselves.
The echo of the passage in _A Midsummer Night's Dream_, describing the
girlish friendship of Hermia and Helena, which we find in the first act
of _The Two Noble Kinsmen_, describing the like girlish friendship of
Emilia and Flavina, is an echo of another sort. Both, I need hardly say,
are unquestionably Shakespeare's; but the fashion in which the matured