poet retouches and completes the sketch of his earlier years--composes an
oil painting, as it were, from the hints and suggestions of a
water-colour sketch long since designed and long since half forgotten--is
essentially different from the mere verbal and literal trick of
repetition which sciolists might think to detect in the present instance.
Again we must needs fall back on the inevitable and indefinable test of
style; a test which could be of no avail if we were foolish enough to
appeal to scholiasts and their attendant dunces, but which should be of
some avail if we appeal to experts and their attentive scholars; and by
this test we can but remark that neither the passage in _A Midsummer
Night's Dream_ nor the corresponsive passage in _The Two Noble Kinsmen_
could have been written by any hand known to us but Shakespeare's;
whereas the passage in _King Edward III_. might as certainly have been
written by any one out of a dozen poets then living as the answering
passage in _Measure for Measure_ could assuredly have been written by
Shakespeare alone.

As on a first reading of the _Hippolytus_ of Euripides we feel that, for
all the grace and freshness and lyric charm of its opening scenes, the
claim of the poem to our ultimate approval or disapproval must needs
depend on the success or failure of the first interview between Theseus
and his calumniated son; and as on finding that scene to be feeble and
futile and prosaic and verbose we feel that the poet who had a woman's
spite against women has here effectually and finally shown himself
powerless to handle the simplest elements of masculine passion, of manly
character and instinct; so in this less important case we feel that the
writer, having ventured on such a subject as the compulsory temptation of
a daughter by a father, who has been entrapped into so shameful an
undertaking through the treacherous exaction of an equivocal promise
unwarily confirmed by an inconsiderate oath, must be judged by the result
of his own enterprise; must fail or stand as a poet by its failure or
success. And his failure is only not complete; he is but just redeemed
from utter discomfiture by the fluency and simplicity of his equable but
inadequate style. Here as before we find plentiful examples of the
gracefully conventional tone current among the lesser writers of the
hour.

_Warwick_. How shall I enter on this graceless errand?
I must not call her child; for where's the f