of the leading playwrights, whose crude dramas he condescended to rewrite or retouch. That graceless vagabond, Robert Greene, addressing from his penitent death-bed his old friends Lodge, Peele, and Marlowe, and trying to dissuade them from "spending their wits" any longer in "making plays," spitefully asserts: "There is an upstart crow beautified with our feathers, that, with his tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide, supposes he is as able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you; and, being an absolute Johannes Factotum, is, in his own conceit, the only Shake-scene in the country." Doubtless this charge of adopting and adapting the productions of others includes some dramas which have not been preserved, as the company to which Shakespeare was attached owned the manuscripts of a great number of plays which were never printed, and it was a custom, when a play had popular elements in it, for other dramatists to be employed in making such additions as would give continual novelty to the old favorite. But of the plays published in our editions of Shakespeare's writings, it is probable that the Comedy of Errors, and the three parts of King Henry VI., are only partially his, and should be classed among his adaptations, and not among his early creations. The play of Pericles bears no marks of his mind, except in some scenes of transcendent power and beauty,

which start up from the rest of the work like towers of gold from a plain of sand; but these scenes are in his latest manner. In regard to the tragedy of Titus Andronicus, we are so constituted as to resist all the external evidence by which such a shapeless mass of horrors and absurdities is fastened on Shakespeare. Mr. Verplanck thinks it one of Shakespeare's first attempts at dramatic composition; but first attempts must reflect the mental condition of the author at the time they were made; and we know the mental condition of Shakespeare in his early manhood by his poem of Venus and Adonis, which he expressly styles "the first heir of his invention." Now leaving out of view the fact that Titus Andronicus stamps the impression, not of youthful, but of matured depravity of taste, its execrable enormities of feeling and incident could not have proceeded from the sweet and comely nature in which the poem had its birth. The best criticism on Titus Andronicus was made by Robert Burns, when he was nine years old. His schoolmaster was reading the play aloud in his father's cottage, and when he came to the scene where Lavinia enters with her hands cut off and her tongue cut out, little Robert fell a-crying, and threatened, in case the play was left in the cottage, to burn it. It is hard to believe that what Burns despised and detested at the age of nine could have been

written by Shakespeare at the age of twenty-five. Taking, then, Venus and Adonis as the point of departure, we find Shakespeare at the age of twenty-two endowed with all the faculties, but relatively deficient in the passions, of the poet. The poem is a throng of thoughts, fancies, and imaginations, somewhat cramped in the utterance. Coleridge says that "in his poems the creative power and the intellectual energy wrestle as in a war embrace. Each in its excess of strength seems to threaten the extinction of the other. At length in the drama they were reconciled, and fought each with its shield before the breast of the other." Fine as this is, it would perhaps be more exact to say that in his earlier poems his intellect, acting in some degree apart from his sensibility, and playing with its own ingenuities of fancy and meditation, condensed its thoughts in crystals. Afterwards, when his whole nature became liquid, he gave us his thoughts in a state of fusion, and his intellect flowed in streams of fire.

Take, for example, that passage in the poem where Venus represents the loveliness of Adonis as sending thrills of passion into the earth on which he treads, and as making the bashful moon hide herself from the sight of his bewildering beauty :

"But if thou fall, O, then imagine this!

The earth, in love with thee, thy footing trips.

And all is but to rob thee of a kiss.

Rich preys make true men thieves; so do thy lips
Make modest Dian cloudy and forlorn,

Lest she should steal a kiss and die fors worn.

"Now of this dark night I perceive the reason:
Cynthia for shame obscures her silver shrine,
Till forging Nature be condemned of treason,

For stealing moulds from heaven that were divine,
Wherein she framed thee, in high heaven's despite,
To shame the sun by day and her by night."

This is reflected and reflecting passion, or, at least, imagination awakening passion, rather than passion penetrating imagination.

Now mark, by contrast, the gush of the heart into the brain, dissolving thought, imagination, and expression, so that they run molten, in the delirious ecstasy of Pericles on recovering his long-lost child:

"O Helicanus! strike me, honour'd sir,

Give me a gash, put me to present pain,

Lest this great sea of joys, rushing upon me,
O'erbear the shores of my mortality,

And drown me with their sweetness."

If, as is probable, Venus and Adonis was written as early as 1586, we may suppose that the plays which represent the immaturity of his genius, and which are strongly marked with the characteristics of that poem, namely, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, the first draft

of Love's Labor's Lost, and the original Romeo and Juliet, were produced before the year 1592. Following these came King Richard III., King Richard II., A Midsummer Night's Dream, King John, The Merchant of Venice, and King Henry IV., all of which we know were written before 1598, when Shakespeare was in his thirty-fourth year. During the next eight years he produced King Henry V., The Merry Wives of Windsor, As You Like it, Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, Othello, Macbeth, and King Lear. In this list are the four great tragedies in which his genius culminated. Then came Troilus and Cressida, Timon of Athens, Julius Cæsar, Antony and Cleopatra, Cymbeline, King Henry VIII., The Tempest, The Winter's Tale, and Coriolanus. If heed be paid to this order of the plays, it will be seen at once that a quotation from Shakespeare carries with it a very different degree of authority, according as it refers to the youth or the maturity of his mind.

Indeed, when we reflect that between the production of The Two Gentlemen of Verona and King Lear there is only a space of fifteen years, we must admit that the history of the human intellect presents no other example of such marvellous progress; and if we note the giant strides by which it was made, we shall find that they all imply a progressive widening and deepen