oyet of Lafeu, and Costard of
the tapster in _Measure for Measure_; and the frequency of the rhymes, the
sweetness as well as the smoothness of the metre, and the number of acute
and fancifully illustrated aphorisms, are all as they ought to be in a
poet's youth. True genius begins by generalising and condensing; it ends
in realising and expanding. It first collects the seeds.

Yet, if this juvenile drama had been the only one extant of our
Shakespeare, and we possessed the tradition only of his riper works, or
accounts of them in writers who had not even mentioned this play,--how many
of Shakespeare's characteristic features might we not still have
discovered in _Love's Labour's Lost_, though as in a portrait taken of him
in his boyhood.

I can never sufficiently admire the wonderful activity of thought
throughout the whole of the first scene of the play, rendered natural, as
it is, by the choice of the characters, and the whimsical determination on
which the drama is founded. A whimsical determination certainly;--yet not
altogether so very improbable to those who are conversant in the history
of the middle ages, with their Courts of Love, and all that lighter
drapery of chivalry, which engaged even mighty kings with a sort of
serio-comic interest, and may well be supposed to have occupied more
completely the smaller princes, at a time when the noble's or prince's
court contained the only theatre of the domain or principality. This sort
of story, too, was admirably suited to Shakespeare's times, when the
English court was still the foster-mother of the state and the muses; and
when, in consequence, the courtiers, and men of rank and fashion, affected
a display of wit, point, and sententious observation, that would be deemed
intolerable at present,--but in which a hundred years of controversy,
involving every great political, and every dear domestic, interest, had
trained all but the lowest classes to participate. Add to this the very
style of the sermons of the time, and the eagerness of the Protestants to
distinguish themselves by long and frequent preaching, and it will be
found that, from the reign of Henry VIII. to the abdication of James II.
no country ever received such a national education as England.

Hence the comic matter chosen in the first instance is a ridiculous
imitation or apery of this constant striving after logical precision and
subtle opposition of thoughts, together with a making the most of every