hing truth, with terrible intensity of
feeling, and with irresistible momentum of action. A spectator will
honour and pity Othello, and hate and execrate Iago--with some infusion,
perhaps of impatience toward the one and of admiration for the
other--but he is likely to view both Leonatus and Iachimo with
considerable indifference; he will casually recognise the infrequent
Cymbeline as an ill-tempered, sonorous old donkey; he will give a
passing smile of scornful disgust to Cloten--that vague hybrid of
Roderigo and Oswald; and of the proceedings of the Queen and the
fortunes of the royal family--whether as affected by the chemical
experiments of Doctor Cornelius or the bellicose attitude of Augustus
Caesar, in reaching for his British tribute--he will be practically
unconscious. This result comes of commingling stern fact and pastoral
fancy in such a way that an auditor of the composition is dubious
whether to fix his senses steadfastly on the one or yield up his spirit
to poetic reverie on the other.

Coleridge--whose intuitions as to such matters were usually as good as
recorded truth--thought that Shakespeare wrote _Cymbeline_ in his
youthful period. He certainly does not manifest in it the cogent and
glittering dramatic force that is felt in _Othello_ and _Macbeth_. The
probability is that he wrought upon the old legend of Holinshed in a
mood of intellectual caprice, inclining towards sensuous and fanciful
dalliance with a remote and somewhat intangible subject. Those persons
who explain the immense fecundity of his creative genius by alleging
that he must steadily have kept in view the needs of the contemporary
theatre seem to forget that he went much further in his plays than there
was any need for him to go, in the satisfaction of such a purpose, and
that those plays are, in general, too great for any stage that has
existed. Shakespeare, it is certain, could not have been an exception to
the law that every author must be conscious of a feeling, apart from
intellectual purpose, that carries him onward in his art. The feeling
that shines through _Cymbeline_ is a loving delight in the character of
Imogen.

The nature of that feeling and the quality of that character, had they
been obscure, would have been made clear by Adelaide Neilson's
embodiment. The personality that she presented was typical and unusual.
It embodied virtue, neither hardened by austerity nor vapid with excess
of goodness, and it embodied seducti