in murk and occidental damp
Moist Hesperus hath quench'd his sleepy lamp;
Or four-and-twenty times the pilot's glass
Hath told the thievish minutes how they pass;
What is infirm from your sound parts shall fly,
Health shall live free, and sickness freely die."

Here we have the special traits of Shakespeare's youthful style,--an
air of artifice and studied finery, a certain self-conscious
elaborateness and imitative rivalry,--which totally disappear in, for
instance, the blessing the Countess gives her son as he is leaving for
the Court:

"Be thou blest, Bertram! and succeed thy father
In manners, as in shape! thy blood and virtue
Contend for empire in thee, and thy goodness
Share with thy birthright! Love all, trust a few,
Do wrong to none; be able for thine enemy
Rather in power than use, and keep thy friend
Under thy own life's key; be check'd for silence,
But never tax'd for speech. What Heaven more will,
That thee may furnish, and my prayers pluck down,
Fall on thy head!"

I the rather quote this latter, because of its marked resemblance to
the advice Polonius gives his son in _Hamlet_. Mr. White justly
observes that "either the latter is an expansion of the former, or the
former a reminiscence of the latter"; and I fully concur with him that
the second part of the alternative is the more probable. It is hardly
needful to add that the passage here quoted breathes a higher and
purer moral tone than the resembling one in _Hamlet_; but this I take
to be merely because the venerable Countess is a higher and purer
source than the old politician. For a broader and bulkier illustration
of the point in hand, the student probably cannot do better than by
comparing in full the dialogue from which the first of the forecited
passages is taken with the whole of the second scene in Act i. These
seem to me at least as apt and telling examples as any, of the Poet's
rawest and ripest styles so strangely mixed in this play; and the
difference is here so clearly pronounced, that one must be dull indeed
not to perceive it.

As regards the notion of Mr. Hunter before referred to, it is indeed
true, as he argues, that the play twice bespeaks its present title;
but both instances occur in just those parts which relish most of the
Poet's later style. And the line in the epilogue,--"_All is well
ended_, if this suit _be won_,"--may be fairly understood as
intimating some