o great thing."

Nor was any very great thing done by the author of _A Warning for Fair
Women_.

{141} I do not know or remember in the whole radiant range of
Elizabethan drama more than one parallel tribute to that paid in this
play by an English poet to the yet foreign art of painting, through the
eloquent mouth of this enthusiastic villain of genius, whom we might
regard as a more genuinely Titianic sort of Wainwright. The parallel
passage is that most lovely and fervid of all imaginative panegyrics on
this art, extracted by Lamb from the comedy of _Doctor Dodipoll_; which
saw the light or twilight of publication just eight years later than
_Arden of Feversham_.

{154} I remember to have somewhere at some time fallen in with some
remark by some commentator to some such effect as this: that it would be
somewhat difficult to excuse the unwomanly violence of this demand.
Doubtless it would. And doubtless it would be somewhat more than
difficult to extenuate the unmaidenly indelicacy of Jeanne Darc.

{179} What would at least be partly lust in another man is all but
purely hatred in Iago.

Now I do love her too:
Not out of absolute lust, (though, peradventure,
I stand accountant for as great a sin)
But partly led to diet my revenge.

For "partly" read "wholly," and for "peradventure" read "assuredly," and
the incarnate father of lies, made manifest in the flesh, here speaks all
but all the truth for once, to himself alone.

{205} I add the proof in a footnote, so as to take up no more than a
small necessary space of my text with the establishment of a fact which
yet can seem insignificant to no mortal who has a human ear for lyric
song. Shakespeare's verse, as all the wide world knows, ends thus:

But my kisses bring again,
bring again,
Seals of love, but sealed in vain,
sealed in vain.

The echo has been dropped by Fletcher, who has thus achieved the
remarkable musical feat of turning a nightingale's note into a sparrow's.
The mutilation of Philomela by the hands of Tereus was a jest compared to
the mutilation of Shakespeare by the hands of Fletcher: who thereby
reduced the close of the first verse into agreement if not into
accordance with the close of his own. This appended verse, as all the
world does not and need not know, ends thus:

But first set my poor heart free,
Bound in those icy chains by thee.

Even an earless owner of fingers