idge and Schlegel more or less ingeniously invite us to acknowledge
a miraculous artistic perfection, where Lamb more movingly gives forth
the intense vibration aroused in his spirit by Shakspere's ripest work,
we must turn back to track down the youth from Stratford; son of a
burgess once prosperous, but destined to sink steadily in the world;
married at eighteen, under pressure of circumstances, with small
prospect of income, to the woman of twenty-five; ill at ease in that
position; and at length, having made friends with a travelling company
of actors, come to London to earn a living in any tolerable way by means
of his moderate education, his "small Latin and less Greek," his knack
of fluent rhyming, and his turn for play-acting. To know him as he began
we must measure him narrowly by his first performances. These are not to
be looked for in even the earliest of his plays, not one of which can be
taken to represent his young and unaided faculty, whether as regards
construction or diction. Collaboration, the natural resort of the modern
dramatist, must have been to some extent forced on him in those years by
the nature of his situation; and after all that has been said by adorers
of the quality of his wit and his verse in such early comedies as
LOVE'S LABOUR LOST and THE TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA, the critical reader
is apt to be left pretty evenly balanced between the two reflections
that the wit and the versification have indeed at times a certain happy
naturalness of their own, and that nevertheless, if they really be
Shakspere's throughout, the most remarkable thing in the matter is his
later progress. But even apart from such disputable issues, we may
safely say with Mr. Fleay that "there is not a play of his that can be
referred even on the rashest conjecture to a date anterior to 1594,
which does not bear the plainest internal evidence of having been
refashioned at a later time."[142] These plays, then, with all their
evidences of immaturity, of what Mr. Bagehot called "clever
young-mannishness," cannot serve us as safe measures of Shakspere's mind
at the beginning of his career.

But it happens that we have such a measure in performances which, since
they imply no technical arrangement, are of a homogenous literary
substance, and can be shown to be the work of a man brought up in the
Warwickshire dialect,[143] are not even challenged, I believe, by the
adherents of the Baconian faith. The tasks which the greate