wain.

_Edward_. Thy beauty makes them guilty of their death
And gives in evidence that they shall die;
Upon which verdict I their judge condemn them.

_Countess_. O perjured beauty! more corrupted judge!
When, to the great star-chamber o'er our heads,
The universal sessions calls to count
This packing evil, we both shall tremble for it.

_Edward_. What says my fair love? is she resolute?

_Countess_. Resolute to be dissolved: {266} and, therefore, this:
Keep but thy word, great king, and I am thine.
Stand where thou dost; I'll part a little from thee;
And see how I will yield me to thy hands.
Here by my side do hang my wedding knives;
Take thou the one, and with it kill thy queen,
And learn by me to find her where she lies;
And with the other I'll despatch my love,
Which now lies fast asleep within my heart:
When they are gone, then I'll consent to love.

Such genuinely good wine as this needs no bush. But from this point
onwards I can find nothing especially commendable in the remainder of the
scene except its brevity. The King of course abjures his purpose, and of
course compares the Countess with Lucretia to the disadvantage of the
Roman matron; summons his son, Warwick, and the attendant lords; appoints
each man his post by sea or land; and starts for Flanders in a duly moral
and military state of mind.

Here ends the first part of the play; and with it all possible
indication, though never so shadowy, of the possible shadowy presence of
Shakespeare. At the opening of the third act we are thrown among a
wholly new set of characters and events, all utterly out of all harmony
and keeping with all that has gone before. Edward alone survives as
nominal protagonist; but this survival--assuredly not of the fittest--is
merely the survival of the shadow of a name. Anything more pitifully
crude and feeble, more helplessly inartistic and incomposite, than this
process or pretence of juncture where there is no juncture, this
infantine shifting and shuffling of the scenes and figures, it is
impossible to find among the rudest and weakest attempts of the dawning
or declining drama in its first or second childhood.

It is the less necessary to analyse at any length the three remaining
acts of this play, that the work has already been done to my hand, and
well done, by Charles Knight; who, though no professed critic or esoteric
expert in Shakespearean lette