ure of those
portraits because he can discriminate and imitate shades of color more
numberless than even Shakespeare's words.

It is hard to believe that the Shakespearian characters were born, like
Athene from the brain of Zeus, in panoplied perfection. They grew. The
play of _Troilus_ was a dozen years in growth. According to the best
commentators, "Shakespeare, after having sketched out a play on the
fashion of his youthful taste and skill, returned in after years to
enlarge it, remodel it, and enrich it with the matured fruits of years
of observation and reflection. _Love's Labor Lost_ first appeared in
print with the annunciation that it was 'newly corrected and augmented,'
and _Cymbeline_ was an entire _rifacimento_ of an early dramatic
attempt, showing not only matured fulness of thought, but laboring
intensity of compressed expression." So speaks Verplanck, and his
utterance is endorsed by Richard Grant White.

Such being the facts, it is clear that Shakespeare treated his dramas as
Guido did the _Cleopatra_, which he would not let leave his studio till
ten years after the non-artistic world deemed that portrait fully
finished. Meantime, the painter in moments of inspiration was pencilling
his canvas with curious touches, each approximating nearer his ideal. So
the poet sought to find out acceptable words, or what he terms "an army
of good words." He poured his new wine into new bottles, and never was
at rest till he had arrayed his ideas in that fitness of phrase which
comes only by fits.

Had he survived fifty years longer, I suppose he would to the last have
been perfecting his phrases, as we read in Dionysius of Halicarnassus
that Plato up to the age of eighty-one was "combing and curling, and
weaving and unweaving, his writings after a variety of fashions."
Possibly, the great dramatist would at last have corrected one of his
couplets as a modern commentator has done for him, so that it would
stand,

Find _leaves_ on trees, _stones_ in the running brooks,
Sermons in _books_, and _all_ in everything.

To speak seriously with a writer in the _Encyclopaedia Britannica:_ "His
manner in diction was progressive, and this progress has been deemed so
clearly traceable in his plays that it can enable us to determine their
chronological sequence." The result is, that while other authors satiate
and soon tire us, Shakespeare's speech for ever "breathes an
indescribable freshness."

Age cann