ds Well_
was originally written before 1598. For myself, I have no doubt that
the first writing was several years before that date; as early at
least as 1592 or 1593. Coleridge, in his _Literary Remains_, holds the
play to have been "originally intended as the counterpart of _Love's
Labour's Lost_"; and a comparison of the two naturally leads to that
conclusion without any help from the title. This inward relation of
the plays strongly infers them both to have been written about the
same time, or in pretty near succession. Now _Love's Labour's Lost_
was published in 1598, and in the title-page is said to have been
"newly corrected and augmented," which fairly supposes the first
writing of that play also to have been several years before, since
some considerable time would naturally pass before the Poet saw cause
for revising his workmanship. And the diversities of style in that
play fully concur herewith in arguing a considerable interval between
the original writing and the revisal.

It is abundantly certain, from internal evidence, that the play now in
hand also underwent revisal, and this too after a much longer interval
than in the case of _Love's Labour's Lost_. Here the diversities of
style are much more strongly marked than in that play. Accordingly it
was Coleridge's decided opinion, first given out in his lectures in
1813, and again in 1818, though not found in his _Literary Remains_,
that "_All's Well that Ends Well_ was written at two different and
rather distant periods of the Poet's life." This we learn from Mr.
Collier, who heard those lectures, and who adds that Coleridge
"pointed out very clearly two distinct styles, not only of thought,
but of expression." The same judgment has since been enforced by Tieck
and other able critics; and the grounds of it are so manifest in the
play itself, that no observant reader will be apt to question it.
Verplanck tells us he had formed the same opinion before he learned
through Mr. Collier what Coleridge thought on the subject; and his
judgment of the matter is given with characteristic felicity as follows:
"The contrast of two different modes of thought and manners of
expression, here mixed in the same piece, must be evident to all who
have made the shades and gradations of Shakespeare's varying and
progressive taste and mind at all a subject of study."[19]

[19] The point is further amplified and illustrated by the same
critic in a passage equally happy, a