t a contagious power through the forms of verse,--this
taste and this skill and control being the very elements by which his
expressions become an echo of the poet's soul,--pleasing, or, in the
uncultivated, helping to form, a like taste in the hearer, and exciting
a like imagined condition of feeling and poetic vision.

Yet if it were made a question, to be decided from internal evidence,
whether the scene here analyzed was written before or after the rest of
the piece, a strong argument for its being written before might be found
in the peculiar impression it leaves upon the fancy. Let us suppose we
follow the author while he runs it over, which he does quite rapidly,
since there are no blotted lines, but only here and there a comma to
be inserted. He designed to open his tragedy. He finds he has set a
scene,--in his mind's eye the entrance-hall to an Athenian house, which
he thinks he has presently intimated plainly enough to be Timon's house.
Here he has brought forward four actors and made them speak as just
meeting; they come by twos from different ways, and the first two
immediately make it known that the other two are a merchant and
jeweller, and almost immediately that they themselves are, one a
painter, the other a poet. They have all brought gifts or goods for
the lord Timon. The Athenian Senators pass over, and, as becomes
their dignity, are at once received in an inner hall,--the first four
remaining on the stage. All is so far clear. He has also, by the
dialogue of the Painter and Poet, made in itself taking to the attention
through the picture and the flighty recitation, suggested and interested
us incidentally in the character of Timon, and conveyed a vague
misgiving of misfortune to come to him. And there is withal a swelling
pomp, three parts rhetorical and one part genuinely poetical, in the
Poet's style, which gives a tone, and prepares the fancy to enter
readily into the spirit of the tragedy. This effect the author wished to
produce; he felt that the piece required it; he was so preoccupied with
the Timon he conceived that he sets to work with a Timon-rich hue of
fancy and feeling; to this note he pitches himself, and begins his
measured march "bold and forth on." What he has assumed to feel he
wishes spectators to feel; and he leaves his style to be colored by his
feeling, because he knows that such is the way to make them feel it. And
we do feel it, and know also that we are made thus to feel thro