is an argument against _Titus Andronicus_ being Shakespeare's, worth
a score such chronological surmises. Yet I incline to think that both in
this play and in _Jeronymo_, Shakespeare wrote some passages, and that
they are the earliest of his compositions.

Act v. sc. 2. I think it not improbable that the lines from--

"I am not mad; I know thee well enough;

to

So thou destroy Rapine, and Murder there"--

were written by Shakespeare in his earliest period. But instead of the
text--

"Revenge, _which makes the foul offenders quake._
_Tit. Art thou_ Revenge? and art thou sent to me?"--

the words in italics ought to be omitted.

"Troilus And Cressida."

"Mr. Pope (after Dryden) informs us that the story of _Troilus and
Cressida_ was originally the work of one Lollius, a Lombard: but
Dryden goes yet further; he declares it to have been written in
Latin verse, and that Chaucer translated it. _Lollius was a
historiographer of Urbino in Italy._"--Note in Stockdale's edition,
1807.

"Lollius was a historiographer of Urbino in Italy." So affirms the notary
to whom the Sieur Stockdale committed the _disfacimento_ of Ayscough's
excellent edition of Shakespeare. Pity that the researchful notary has not
either told us in what century, and of what history, he was a writer, or
been simply content to depose, that Lollius, if a writer of that name
existed at all, was a somewhat somewhere. The notary speaks of the _Troy
Boke_ of Lydgate, printed in 1513. I have never seen it; but I deeply
regret that Chalmers did not substitute the whole of Lydgate's works from
the MSS. extant, for the almost worthless Gower.

The _Troilus and Cressida_ of Shakespeare can scarcely be classed with his
dramas of Greek and Roman history; but it forms an intermediate link
between the fictitious Greek and Roman histories, which we may call
legendary dramas, and the proper ancient histories,--that is, between the
_Pericles_ or _Titus Andronicus_, and the _Coriolanus_ or _Julius Caesar_.
_Cymbeline_ is a _congener_ with _Pericles_, and distinguished from _Lear_
by not having any declared prominent object. But where shall we class the
_Timon of Athens_? Perhaps immediately below _Lear_. It is a _Lear_ of the
satirical drama; a _Lear_ of domestic or ordinary life;--a local eddy of
passion on the high road of society, while all around is the week-day
goings on of wind and weather; a _Lear_, therefore, without it