them: as Fletcher's Hengo,
Webster's Giovanni, and Landor's Caesarion. Of this princely trinity of
boys the "bud of Britain" is as yet the most famous flower; yet even in
the broken words of childish heroism that falter on his dying lips there
is nothing of more poignant pathos, more "dearly sweet and bitter," than
Giovanni's talk of his dead mother and all her sleepless nights now ended
for ever in a sleep beyond tears or dreams. Perhaps the most nearly
faultless in finish and proportion of perfect nature among all the noble
three is Landor's portrait of the imperial and right Roman child of Caesar
and Cleopatra. I know not but this may be found in the judgment of men
to come wellnigh the most pathetic and heroic figure bequeathed us after
more than eighty years of a glorious life by the indomitable genius of
our own last Roman and republican poet.

We have come now to that point at the opening of the second stage in his
work where the supreme genius of all time begins first to meddle with the
mysteries and varieties of human character, to handle its finer and more
subtle qualities, to harmonise its more untuned and jarring discords;
giving here and thus the first proof of a power never shared in like
measure by the mightiest among the sons of men, a sovereign and serene
capacity to fathom the else unfathomable depths of spiritual nature, to
solve its else insoluble riddles, to reconcile its else irreconcilable
discrepancies. In his first stage Shakespeare had dropped his plummet no
deeper into the sea of the spirit of man than Marlowe had sounded before
him; and in the channel of simple emotion no poet could cast surer line
with steadier hand than he. Further down in the dark and fiery depths of
human pain and mortal passion no soul could search than his who first
rendered into speech the aspirations and the agonies of a ruined and
revolted spirit. And until Shakespeare found in himself the strength of
eyesight to read and the cunning of handiwork to render those wider
diversities of emotion and those further complexities of character which
lay outside the range of Marlowe, he certainly cannot be said to have
outrun the winged feet, outstripped the fiery flight of his forerunner.
In the heaven of our tragic song the first-born star on the forehead of
its herald god was not outshone till the full midsummer meridian of that
greater godhead before whom he was sent to prepare a pathway for the sun.
Through all the fo