one of
those incomparable pictures in 'Romeo and Juliet.'" In Peele's other
plays he has made but feeble attempts to depict love, beauty, or grace;
in "King David" he has "depicted them with a remarkably high degree of
success."

These are all the works of Peele which have come down to our time, and
after this review of his and of Greene's dramas, it does not seem that
"Greene and Peele were the chief makers of such plays," that is, of
"chronicle histories," before Marlowe. The truth is, that all the
supporters of Malone's theory have taken Malone's unsupported statement
as indisputable fact; they have not sufficiently examined the works of
Greene and Peele, but have assumed, as Malone assumed, that Greene's
charge in his "Groat's Worth of Wit" was conclusive proof that Shakspere
did not write the two parts of the "Contention," and that Greene, or one
of the friends he addresses, was in fact the author.

This assumption has again and again been shown to be without foundation.
There was no point in Greene's dying sarcasm if he merely quoted a line
written by himself; if he quoted one written by Shakspere, the whole
argument of Professor Wendell, that "Henry VI." was "certainly
collaborative," that his early work was "hack-writing," that "he hardly
ever did anything first," that "to his contemporaries he must have
seemed deficient in originality," falls to the ground.

Having done what Malone failed to do, and what Professor Wendell seems
not to have done,--having reviewed at some length the works of
Shakspere's contemporaries to whom the older chronicle plays are
attributed by Malone,--we invoke, in support of the position we have
taken, the opinion of Mr. Charles Knight in his "Essay on Henry VI. and
Richard III."

"The dramatic works of Greene, which were amongst the rarest treasures
of the bibliographer, have been rendered accessible to the general
reader by the valuable labors of Mr. Dyce. To those who are familiar
with these works we will appeal, without hesitation, in saying that the
character of Greene's mind, and his habits of composition, rendered him
utterly incapable of producing, not the Two Parts of the 'Contention,'
or one Part, but a single sustained scene of either Part.

"And yet a belief has been long entertained in England, to which some
wise and judicious still cling, that Greene and Peele either wrote the
Two Parts of the 'Contention' in conjunction; or that Greene wrote one
Part and Peele the