to determining the development of his art. There is a good basis of external evidence to begin with, in the plays published before 1600, and it is probable that the application of various tests will enable critics to arrange the plays not published before 1623 in some approach to the order of their composition, and even to detect additions or alterations made on the first copy. I have not yet seen any considerations affording grounds for departing to any great extent from Malone's arrangement, except in the case of the "Tempest," which was probably composed before the date assigned by Malone. I should place the "Winter's Tale" at the end of the list of Shakespeare's works. But the subject will be more ripe for discussion when the Shakspere Society has published its labours.

Increase of power is most apparent in Shakespeare's tragedies. He began with imitating Marlowe. In "Titus Andronicus," and the two Chronicle Histories on the wars between York and Lancaster-which I take to be authentic works of Shakespeare's-the imitation of Marlowe is so strong, that several critics have ascribed them to that poet, in defiance both of external and of internal evidence. But he soon left off this imitation. There is no more of it in "Richard • III." or in "Richard II." than there is in "Hamlet" or " Macbeth." I should be disposed to place "Richard II." after "Richard III.," partly because "Richard III." is a natural continuation of the preceding chronicle histories, and partly because "Richard II." is more richly coloured, showing the poet's advance towards "Romeo and Juliet." It is remarkable that "Richard II." contains no mixture of comedy. In "Romeo and Juliet," the dramatist first dares to exhibit the grave and the ridiculous side by side in the same action. His great tragedies, which represent the maturity of his power, are more darkly coloured and more strongly woven together than his earlier efforts.

The danger in the application of tests is that facts be more or less bent to suit them. I am not sure that Mr J. W. Hales, so far as one can gather from the report of his lectures in the 'Academy,' has altogether escaped this danger.

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He certainly exaggerates the faintness of the characterisa tion in Shakespeare's earlier work. That is a quality which must appear in a man's earliest works, if he has got it in him at all. It may be admitted that Shakespeare acquired greater power in the expression of character. That could hardly have been otherwise. But to say that there is only one character in "Richard III.," and no character in "Love's Labour Lost," or in the Two Gentlemen of Verona," is to raise a doubt whether Mr Hales has very much appreciation of the sayings and doings that reveal character. As a study of character, Shakespeare's Margaret is quite equal to his Richard, and the three disconsolate ladies are distinguished with subtle and careful art. Valentine and Proteus are distinct and purposely opposed types of character: and Mr Hales gives other evidence of hasty study or imperfect appreciation of this play when he describes it as an inconsistency on the part of Silvia, of which Shakespeare would not have been guilty in later years, to reject the love of Proteus, and yet agree to send her picture to him next morning. The four lovers in "Love's Labour Lost" are also distinct men, and this play contains also the character of Holofernes, a study not inferior in subtle art to the Sir Toby Belch of Shakespeare's most mature period. But perhaps when Mr Hales has explained his views at greater length, they may prove more in accordance with the facts than appears in a condensed summary. I cannot, however, say that I expect any very strikingly new results from the application of "tests" to settle the order of Shakespeare's plays.

II. HIS WORDS AND IMAGERY.

The art of putting things cleverly and playing upon words was never carried to a greater height than in the age of Elizabeth. The Elizabethans were conscious wordartists" engineers of phrases," as Thomas Nash said. "To see this age!" cries the clown in "Twelfth Night,"

"a sentence is but a cheveril glove to a good wit; how quickly the wrong side may be turned outward!" And this same clown was acting in delicious caricature of the age, when he fastidiously rejected the word "element"-" Who you are and what you would are out of my welkin, I might say 'element,' but the word is overdone."

The delight in similitudes went naturally with this extravagant craze for uncommon expression: the fancy was solicited, and when solicitation failed, was tortured to satisfy the reigning fashion. They ransacked for comparisons the heavens above, the earth beneath, the waters under the earth, and the historical and mythical generations of earth's inhabitants. The wit of those days viewed the whole world as so much figurative material; he knew it as a painter knows his box of colours, or an enthusiastic, botanist the flora of his own parish.

That was the sort of fermentation likely to produce great masters of words. To call a spade a spade is a most benumbing and stifling maxim to literary genius: an Elizabethan would not have called a spade a spade if he could possibly have found anything else to call it. The Elizabethan literature would not have been the rich field that it is had a wretched host of Dean Alfords been in the ascendant, with their miserable notions about idiomatic purity and Queen's English.

The number of words used by Shakespeare is said to be 15,000; and the prodigious magnitude of this number is usually brought out by comparing it with Milton's number, which is 8000.1 We might say to him as Katherine said to Wolsey :

1 Shakespeare's use of technical terms and phrases deserves special notice, as having created quite a department of literature. Several volumes have been written, dwelling upon all phraseology that belongs, whether exclusively or not, to special trades, occupations, or professions; each contending for some one occupation that Shakespeare must have engaged in before he could have been able to use its technicalities with such abundance and discrimination. The phraseology of law, medicine, surgery, chemistry, war, navigation, music, field-sports, black-art-the phraseology of each of these was used by Shakespeare, it is argued, with the intelligence of an experienced proficient. We have also special treatises on his acquaintance

"Your words,

Domestics to you, serve your will as 't please
Yourself pronounce their office;"

and add that his verbal establishment was upon an unparalleled scale. To some extent, indeed, it would seem that those hosts of servants were too officious; obtruding their services in such jostling numbers as to embarrass operations. It would appear as if, when Shakespeare sat in the heat of composition, every word in the sentence just penned overwhelmed him with its associations; so perfectly were his intellectual forces mobilised, and so fresh and eager were they for employment. And besides these officious troops of words, he had in his service troops of images no less officious, no less ready to appear upon the slightest hint. Upon the slightest hint that they were wanted, they came flashing in with lightning excitement from all quarters; from pages of poems, histories, and even compendiums, from echoes of the stage, from all regions of earth and sky that he had seen or realised in thought.

M. Taine lays most stress upon the copiousness of Shakespeare's imagery. "It is a series of paintings which is unfolded in his mind. He does not seek them, they come of themselves; they crowd within him, covering his arguments; they dim with their brightness the pure light of logic. He does not labour to explain or prove; picture on picture, image on image, he is for ever copying the strange and

with botany, entomology, and orthithology. When each of several volumes contends for a different occupation as the occupation of Shakespeare's youth or early manhood, and each argues on the same fundamental principle with equal conclusiveness, they refute each other and discredit their common principle. The principle underlying all these arguments is, that a man cannot use the phraseology of an occupation without having prac tised that occupation. It is reduced to an absurdity by the latest work in the department, Mr Blades's 'Shakspere and Typography;' in which it is cleverly argued from Shakespeare's use of printing technicalities that he must have been a printer. The fact is that Shakespeare's contemporaries as well as himself ransacked all trades and professions for striking phrases. Legal terms were in particular request, and it was not necessary for Shakespeare to study, much less to practise law, in order to acquire them: they abounded in the general literature of the period.

splendid visions which are engendered one within another, and are heaped up within him."

Now I am not prepared to admit that Shakespeare's argumentative faculty was thus overwhelmed by the enthusiasm of imagery. If the dramatist's mind had been thus overpoweringly pictorial, he would have been too much. carried away by the imagination of the splendid portents, the blazing meteors, and feverish earthquakes, that prefigured Glendower's birth, to be capable of meeting it with Hotspur's rejoinder, conceived on the soundest principles of inductive philosophy; the fascination of the fiery heaven and shaking earth would have prevented him from seeing that the same things might have happened if Glendower's mother's cat had but kittened though himself had never been born. That is a typical instance of logical faculty rising superior to the engrossing force of imagination. Apart, however, from that, I am of opinion that M. Taine exaggerates the pictorial side of Shakespeare's genius. It doubtless affords a very plausible explanation of Shakespeare's mixed metaphors to say that they were produced by the press and crush of thronging images; as his liberties with grammatical usage arose from over-abundance and strong pressure of words. But there is reason to believe that Shakespeare, like every other great verbal artist, took more delight in words than in forms and colours, as a painter takes more delight in forms and colours than in words: and that he was tempted both to mixed metaphors and to violations of grammatical usage by a desire for fresh and startling combinations of words. This thirst of his ear for new conjunctions overpowered every other consideration. When he was importuned by several images at once, he knocked two or three of them forcibly together; but I believe that the temptation to do so came chiefly from his delight in the new marriage of words thus consummated.

Indeed, we spread a radical misconception of the poet's art, of the means whereby he gains his hold upon our sensibilities, when we lay M. Taine's stress upon the genesis of his imagery. It is not the pictures of form and colour that