to recombine in the same play till our own time had
given us, in the author of _Tragaldabas_, one who could alternate without
confusing the woodland courtship of Eliseo and Caprina with the tavern
braggardism of Grif and Minotoro. The sweetness and simplicity of lyric
or elegiac loveliness which fill and inform the scenes where Adriana, her
sister, and the Syracusan Antipholus exchange the expression of their
errors and their loves, belong to Shakespeare alone; and may help us to
understand how the young poet who at the outset of his divine career had
struck into this fresh untrodden path of poetic comedy should have been,
as we have seen that he was, loth to learn from another and an alien
teacher the hard and necessary lesson that this flowery path would never
lead him towards the loftier land of tragic poetry. For as yet, even in
the nominally or intentionally tragic and historic work of the first
period, we descry always and everywhere and still preponderant the lyric
element, the fantastic element, or even the elegiac element. All these
queens and heroines of history and tragedy have rather an Ovidian than a
Sophoclean grace of bearing and of speech.

The example afforded by the _Comedy of Errors_ would suffice to show that
rhyme, however inadequate for tragic use, is by no means a bad instrument
for romantic comedy. In another of Shakespeare's earliest works, which
might almost be described as a lyrical farce, rhyme plays also a great
part; but the finest passage, the real crown and flower of _Love's
Labour's Lost_, is the praise or apology of love spoken by Biron in blank
verse. This is worthy of Marlowe for dignity and sweetness, but has also
the grace of a light and radiant fancy enamoured of itself, begotten
between thought and mirth, a child-god with grave lips and laughing eyes,
whose inspiration is nothing akin to Marlowe's. In this as in the
overture of the play and in its closing scene, but especially in the
noble passage which winds up for a year the courtship of Biron and
Rosaline, the spirit which informs the speech of the poet is finer of
touch and deeper of tone than in the sweetest of the serious interludes
of the _Comedy of Errors_. The play is in the main a yet lighter thing,
and more wayward and capricious in build, more formless and fantastic in
plot, more incomposite altogether than that first heir of Shakespeare's
comic invention, which on its own ground is perfect in its consistency,
bl