s a thing hardly bearable by
men who object to too strong a savour of those too truly "Eternal
Cesspools" over which the first of living humourists holds as it were for
ever an everlasting nose--or rather, in one sense, does not hold but
expand it for the fuller inhalation of their too congenial fumes with an
apparent relish which will always seem the most deplorable to those who
the most gratefully and reasonably admire that high heroic genius, for
love of which the wiser sort of men must finally forgive all the noisy
aberrations of his misanthropy and philobulgary, anti-Gallican and
Russolatrous insanities of perverse and morbid eloquence.

The three detached or misclassified plays of Shakespeare in which alone a
reverent and reasonable critic might perhaps find something rationally
and really exceptionable have also this far other quality in common, that
in them as in his topmost tragedies of the same period either the
exaltation of his eloquence touches the very highest point of expressible
poetry, or his power of speculation alternately sounds the gulfs and
scales the summits of all imaginable thought. In all three of them the
power of passionate and imaginative eloquence is not only equal in spirit
or essence but identical in figure or in form: in those two of them which
deal almost as much with speculative intelligence as with poetic action
and passion, the tones and methods, types and objects of thought, are
also not equal only but identical. An all but absolute brotherhood in
thought and style and tone and feeling unites the quasi-tragedy of
_Troilus and Cressida_ with what in the lamentable default of as apt a
phrase in English I must call by its proper designation in French the
_tragedie manquee_ of _Measure for Measure_. In the simply romantic
fragment of the Shakespearean _Pericles_, where there was no call and no
place for the poetry of speculative or philosophic intelligence, there is
the same positive and unmistakable identity of imaginative and passionate
style.

I cannot but conjecture that the habitual students of Shakespeare's
printed plays must have felt startled as by something of a shock when the
same year exposed for the expenditure of their sixpences two reasonably
correct editions of a play unknown to the boards in the likeness of
_Troilus and Cressida_, side by side or cheek by jowl with a most
unreasonably and unconscionably incorrect issue of a much older stage
favourite, now newly beaut