ith presage of a direr day is drawn by the same strong
hand in the same tragic outline. From the first to the last stage of the
work there is no mark of change or progress here; the whole play indeed
has undergone less revision, as it certainly needed less, than the
preceding part of the _Contention_. Those great verses which resume the
whole spirit of Shakespeare's Richard--finer perhaps in themselves than
any passage of the play which bears his name--are wellnigh identical in
either form of the poem; but the reviser, with admirable judgment, has
struck out, whether from his own text or that of another, the line which
precedes them in the original sketch, where the passage runs thus:--

I had no father, I am like no father;
I have no brothers, I am like no brother;

(this reiteration is exactly in the first manner of our tragic drama;)

And this word love, which greybeards term divine, etc.

It would be an impertinence to transcribe the rest of a passage which
rings in the ear of every reader's memory; but it may be noted that the
erasure by which its effect is so singularly heightened with the inborn
skill of so divine an instinct is just such an alteration as would be
equally likely to occur to the original writer on glancing over his
printed text or to a poet of kindred power, who, while busied in
retouching and filling out the sketch of his predecessor, might be struck
by the opening for so great an improvement at so small a cost of
suppression. My own conjecture would incline to the belief that we have
here a perfect example of the manner in which Shakespeare may be
presumed, when such a task was set before him, to have dealt with the
text of Marlowe. That at the outset of his career he was so employed, as
well as on the texts of lesser poets, we have on all hands as good
evidence of every kind as can be desired; proof on one side from the text
of the revised plays, which are as certainly in part the work of his hand
as they are in part the work of another; and proof on the opposite side
from the open and clamorous charge of his rivals, whose imputations can
be made to bear no reasonable meaning but this by the most violent
ingenuity of perversion, and who presumably were not persons of such
frank imbecility, such innocent and infantine malevolence, as to forge
against their most dangerous enemy the pointless and edgeless weapon of a
charge which, if ungrounded, must have been easier to refute than