ight sweet
brotherhood of style, the two comedies of _Twelfth Night_ and _As You
Like It_ would stand forth confessed as the common offspring of the same
spiritual period by force and by right of the trace or badge they proudly
and professedly bear in common, as of a recent touch from the ripe and
rich and radiant influence of Rabelais. No better and no fuller
vindication of his happy memory could be afforded than by the evident
fact that the two comedies which bear the imprint of his sign-manual are
among all Shakespeare's works as signally remarkable for the cleanliness
as for the richness of their humour. Here is the right royal seal of
Pantagruel, clean-cut and clearly stamped, and unincrusted with any flake
of dirt from the dubious finger of Panurge. In the comic parts of those
plays in which the humour is rank and flagrant that exhales from the lips
of Lucio, of Boult, or of Thersites, there is no trace or glimpse of
Rabelais. From him Shakespeare has learnt nothing and borrowed nothing
that was not wise and good and sweet and clean and pure. All the more
honour, undoubtedly, to Shakespeare, that he would borrow nothing else:
but assuredly, also, all the more honour to Rabelais, that he had enough
of this to lend.

It is less creditable to England than honourable to France that a
Frenchman should have been the first of Shakespearean students to
discover and to prove that the great triad of his Roman plays is not a
consecutive work of the same epoch. Until the appearance of Francois-
Victor Hugo's incomparable translation, with its elaborate and admirable
commentary, it seems to have been the universal and certainly a most
natural habit of English criticism to take the three as they usually
appear together, in the order of historical chronology, and by tacit
implication to assume that they were composed in such order. I should
take some shame to myself but that I feel more of grateful pride than of
natural shame in the avowal that I at all events owe the first revelation
of the truth now so clear and apparent in this matter, to the son of the
common lord and master of all poets born in his age--be they liege
subjects as loyal as myself or as contumacious as I grieve to find one at
least of my elders and betters, whenever I perceive--as too often I
cannot choose but perceive--that the voice is the voice of Arnold, but
the hand is the hand of Sainte-Beuve.

To the honoured and lamented son of our beloved and