nce,
and the exclusion, or very sparing employment, of coincidence. This is a
matter of importance, into which we shall find it worth while to look
somewhat closely.

It is not always clearly recognized that chance and coincidence are by
no means the same thing. Coincidence is a special and complex form of
chance, which ought by no means to be confounded with the everyday
variety. We need not here analyse chance, or discuss the philosophic
value of the term. It is enough that we all know what we mean by it in
common parlance. It may be well, however, to look into the etymology of
the two words we are considering. They both come ultimately, from the
Latin "cadere," to fall. Chance is a falling-out, like that of a die
from the dice-box; and coincidence signifies one falling-out on the top
of another, the concurrent happening of two or more chances which
resemble or somehow fit into each other. If you rattle six dice in a box
and throw them, and they turn up at haphazard--say, two aces, a deuce,
two fours, and a six--there is nothing remarkable in this falling out.
But if they all turn up sixes, you at once suspect that the dice are
cogged; and if that be not so--if there be no sufficient cause behind
the phenomenon--you say that this identical falling-out of six separate
possibilities was a remarkable coincidence. Now, applying the
illustration to drama, I should say that the playwright is perfectly
justified in letting chance play its probable and even inevitable part
in the affairs of his characters; but that, the moment we suspect him of
cogging the dice, we feel that he is taking an unfair advantage of us,
and our imagination either cries, "I won't play!" or continues the game
under protest.

Some critics have considered it a flaw in Shakespeare's art that the
catastrophe of _Romeo and Juliet_ should depend upon a series of
chances, and especially on the miscarriage of the Friar's letter to
Romeo. This is not, I think, a valid criticism. We may, if we are so
minded, pick to pieces the course of action which brought these chances
into play. The device of the potion--even if such a drug were known to
the pharmacopoeia--is certainly a very clumsy method of escape from the
position in which Juliet is placed by her father's obstinacy. But when
once we have accepted that integral part of the legend, the intervention
of chance in the catastrophe is entirely natural and probable. Observe
that there is no coincidence in the