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itself will defeat the artist. Of every author's works, one will be the best, and one will be the worst. The colours are not equally pleasing, nor the attitudes equally graceful, in all the pictures of Titian or Reynolds.

"Dissimilitude of style and heterogeneousness of sentiment may sufficiently show that a work does not really belong to the reputed author; but in these plays no such marks of spuriousness are found. The diction, the versification, and the figures, are Shakespeare's. These plays, considered, without regard to characters and incidents, merely as narratives in verse, are more happily conceived, and more accurately finished, than those of KING JOHN, KING RICHARD II., or the tragic scenes of KING HENRY IV. and HENRY V. If we take these plays from Shakespeare, to whom shall they be given? What author of that age had the same easiness of expression and fluency of numbers? 58

"Of these three plays, I think the second is the best. The truth is, that they have not sufficient variety of action, for the incidents are too often of the same kind; yet many of the characters are well discriminated. King Henry and his Queen, King Edward, the Duke of Glos ter, and the Earl of Warwick, are very strongly and distinctly painted.

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The old copies of the two latter parts of KING HENRY VI. and of KING HENRY V. are so apparently mutilated and imperfect, that there is no reason for sup posing them the first draughts of Shakespeare. I am inclined to believe them copies taken by some author. who wrote down during the representation what the time would permit; then, perhaps, filled up some of his omissions at a second or third hearing,-and, when he had by this method formed something like a play, sent it to the printer."-JOHNSON.

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