le of energies
and of passions, we miss the music of a younger note that rang through
_Romeo and Juliet_; but before the end this too revives, as pure, as
sweet, as fresh, but richer now and deeper than its first clear notes of
the morning, in the heavenly harmony of _Cymbeline_ and _The Tempest_.

The same effusion or effervescence of words is perceptible in _King
Richard II_. as in the greater (and the less good) part of _Romeo and
Juliet_; and not less perceptible is the perpetual inclination of the
poet to revert for help to rhyme, to hark back in search of support
towards the half-forsaken habits of his poetic nonage. Feeling his
foothold insecure on the hard and high ascent of the steeps of rhymeless
verse, he stops and slips back ever and anon towards the smooth and
marshy meadow whence he has hardly begun to climb. Any student who
should wish to examine the conditions of the struggle at its height may
be content to analyse the first act of this the first historical play of
Shakespeare. As the tragedy moves onward, and the style gathers strength
while the action gathers speed,--as (to borrow the phrase so admirably
applied by Coleridge to Dryden) the poet's chariot-wheels get hot by
driving fast,--the temptation of rhyme grows weaker, and the hand grows
firmer which before lacked strength to wave it off. The one thing wholly
or greatly admirable in this play is the exposition of the somewhat
pitiful but not unpitiable character of King Richard. Among the scenes
devoted to this exposition I of course include the whole of the death-
scene of Gaunt, as well the part which precedes as the part which follows
the actual appearance of his nephew on the stage; and into these scenes
the intrusion of rhyme is rare and brief. They are written almost wholly
in pure and fluent rather than vigorous or various blank verse; though I
cannot discern in any of them an equality in power and passion to the
magnificent scene of abdication in Marlowe's _Edward II_. This play, I
think, must undoubtedly be regarded as the immediate model of
Shakespeare's; and the comparison is one of inexhaustible interest to all
students of dramatic poetry. To the highest height of the earlier master
I do not think that the mightier poet who was as yet in great measure his
pupil has ever risen in this the first (as I take it) of his historic
plays. Of composition and proportion he has perhaps already a somewhat
better idea. But in grasp of char