ll-less, yet most quaint,
And sweet thyme true."

or--

"Oxlips in their cradles growing"

or--

"Not an angel of the air,
Bird melodious, or bird fair,
Be absent hence."

--were written by Shakespeare and not by Fletcher. Nor is it any
detraction from Fletcher to take this view. Shakespeare himself has
left songs hardly finer than Fletcher wrote at his best--hardly finer,
for instance, than that magnificent pair from _Valentinian_. Only the
note of Shakespeare happens to be different from the note of
Fletcher: and it is Shakespeare's note--the note of

"The cowslips tall her pensioners be"

(also omitted by the inscrutable Dyce) and of

"When daisies pied, and violets blue,
And lady-smocks all silver-white,
And cuckoo buds of yellow hue
Do paint the meadows with delight ..."

--that we hear repeated in this Bridal Song.[A] And if this be so, it
is but another proof for us that Dyce was not a critic for all time.

Nor is the accent of finality conspicuous in such passages as this
from the Memoir:--

"Wright had heard that Shakespeare 'was a much better poet than
player'; and Rowe tells us that soon after his admission into the
company, he became distinguished, 'if not as an extraordinary
actor, yet as an excellent writer.' Perhaps his execution did not
equal his conception of a character, but we may rest assured that
he who wrote the incomparable instructions to the player in
_Hamlet_ would never offend his audience by an injudicious
performance."

I have no more to urge against writing of this order than that it has
passed out of fashion, and that something different might reasonably
have been looked for in a volume that bears the date 1894 on its
title-page. The public owes Messrs. Bell & Sons a heavy debt; but at
the same time the public has a peculiar interest in such a series as
that of _The Aldine Poets_. A purchaser who finds several of these
books to his mind, and is thereby induced to embark upon the purchase
of the entire series, must feel a natural resentment if succeeding
volumes drop below the implied standard. He cannot go back: and to
omit the offending volumes is to spoil his set. And I contend that the
action taken by Messrs. Bell & Sons in improving several of their more
or less obsolete editions will only be entirely praiseworthy if we may
take it as an earnest of their desire to pl