ges to come upon a mimicry of the style of Shakespeare so close
as this:

We are so more than poor,
The dear'st of all our spoil would profit you
Less than mere losing; so most more than weak
It were but shame for one to smite us, who
Could but weep louder.

A Shakespearean trick is copied in such lines as:

All other women's praise
Makes part of my blame, and things of least account
In them are all my praises.

And there is a jester who talks in a metre that might have come
straight out of Beaumont and Fletcher, as here:

I am considering of that apple still;
It hangs in the mouth yet sorely; I would fain know too
Why nettles are not good to eat raw. Come, children,
Come, my sweet scraps; come, painted pieces; come.

Touches of the early Browning come into this Elizabethan work, come and
go there, as in these lines:

What are you made God's friend for but to have
His hand over your head to keep it well
And warm the rainy weather through, when snow
Spoils half the world's work?

And does one not hear Beddoes in the grim line, spoken of the earth:

Naked as brown feet of unburied men?

An influence still more closely contemporary seems to be felt in _Fair
Rosamond_, the influence of that extraordinarily individual blank verse
which William Morris had made his first and last experiment in, two
years earlier, in _Sir Peter Harpdon's End_.

So many influences, then, are seen at work on the form at least of these
two plays, published at the age of twenty-three. _Fair Rosamond_,
though it has beautiful lines here and there, and shows some
anticipation of that luxurious heat and subtle rendering of physical
sensation which was to be so evident in the _Poems and Ballads_, is
altogether a less mature piece of work, less satisfactory in every way,
than the longer and more regular drama of _The Queen-Mother_. Swinburne
speaks of the two pieces without distinction, and finds all that there
is in them of promise or of merit 'in the language and the style of such
better passages as may perhaps be found in single and separable speeches
of Catherine and of Rosamond.' But the difference between these speeches
is very considerable. Those of Rosamond are wholly elegiac, lamentations
and meditations recited, without or against occasion. In the best
speeches of Catherine there is not only a more masculine s