This will remind the reader of Scott's Euphuist, Sir Piercie Shafton,
who, if I remember aright, uses some of these very phrases, in which
Shakespeare has beaten Lilly at his own weapons, and made his affected
phraseology the vehicle of the touching utterance of real feeling.
"Euphues" was published in 1580, when Shakespeare was only sixteen years
old; and this passage, although it may have been written or perhaps
altered later, was probably a part of the play as it was first produced.
The scene ends with the following speech by Helen, which, for its
peculiar characteristics, is worth quoting entire. The reader who will
compare it with "Love's Labor's Lost" and "A Midsummer Night's Dream"
will have not a moment's doubt as to the time when it was written:

Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie
Which we ascribe to heaven: the fated sky
Gives us free scope, only doth backward pull
Our slow designs when we ourselves are dull.
What power is it which mounts my love so high
That makes me see and cannot feed mine eye?
The mightiest space in fortune nature brings
To join like likes and kiss like native things.
Impossible be strange attempts to those
That weigh their pains in sense and do suppose
What hath been cannot be: whoever strove
To show her merit that did miss her love?
The king's disease--my project may deceive me,
But my intents are fixed and will not leave me.

Besides its formal construction and its rhyme, this passage is overmuch
afflicted with youngness to be accepted as the product of any other
than Shakespeare's very earliest period. Of like quality to this are
other passages scattered through the play. For example, the Countess's
speech, Act I., Sc. 3, beginning, "Even so it was with me"; all the
latter part of Act II., Sc. 1, from Helen's speech, "What I can do,"
etc., to the end, seventy lines; passages in the third scene of this
act, which the reader cannot now fail at once to detect for himself;
Helen's letter, Act III., Sc. 4, and Parolles's, Act IV., Sc. 3; and
various passages in the last act. Shakespeare, I have no doubt, wrote
this play at first nearly all in rhyme in the earliest years of his
dramatic life, and afterward, late in his career, possibly on two
occasions, rewrote it and gave it a new name; using prose, to save time
and labor, in those passages the elevation of which did not require
poetical treatment, and in those which were suited