is never good"
to do so: yet here I cannot choose but speak plainly after my own poor
conscience, and risk all chances of chastisement as fearful as any once
threatened for her too faithful messenger by the heart-stricken wrath of
Cleopatra.

In the greater part of this third period, taking a swift and general view
of it for contrast or comparison of qualities with the second, we
constantly find beauty and melody, transfigured into harmony and
sublimity; an exchange unquestionably for the better: but in certain
stages, or only perhaps in a single stage of it, we frequently find
humour and reality supplanted by realism and obscenity; an exchange
undeniably for the worse. The note of his earliest comic style was often
a boyish or a birdlike wantonness, very capable of such liberties and
levities as those of Lesbia's sparrow with the lip or bosom of his
mistress; as notably in the parts of Boyet and Mercutio: and indeed there
is a bright vein of mere wordy wilfulness running throughout the golden
youth of the two plays which connects _Love's Labour's Lost_ with _Romeo
and Juliet_ as by a thread of floss silk not always "most excellently
ravelled," nor often unspotted or unentangled. In the second period this
gaiety was replaced by the utmost frankness and fullness of humour, as a
boy's merry madness by the witty wisdom of a man: but now for a time it
would seem as if the good comic qualities of either period were displaced
and ousted by mere coarseness and crudity like that of a hard harsh
photograph. This ultra-Circean transformation of spirit and
brutification of speech we do not find in the lighter interludes of great
and perfect tragedy: for the porter in _Macbeth_ makes hardly an
exception worth naming. It is when we come upon the singular little
group of two or three plays not accurately definable at all but roughly
describable as tragi-comedies, or more properly in two cases at least as
tragedies docked of their natural end, curtailed of the due
catastrophe--it is then that we find for the swift sad bright lightnings
of laughter from the lips of the sweet and bitter fool whose timeless
disappearance from the stage of _King Lear_ seems for once a sure sign of
inexplicable weariness or forgetfulness on Shakespeare's part, so
nauseous and so sorry a substitute as the fetid fun and rancid ribaldry
of Pandarus and Thersites. I must have leave to say that the coincidence
of these two in the scheme of a single play i