asure. Some of the fifty, to be sure, are mere
star-dust, but others include some of the very jewels of our tongue.
They range in form from the sophisticated quatorzains of _The Two
Gentlemen of Verona_ (where, however, comes "Who is Silvia?") to the
reckless snatches of melody in _Hamlet_. But all have a character which
is Shakespearean, and this regardless of the question so often raised,
and so incapable of reply, as to whether some of the wilder ones are
Shakespeare's composition or no. Whoever originally may have written
such scraps as "They bore him bare-faced on the bier" and "Come o'er the
bourne, Bessy, to me," the spirit of Shakespeare now pervades and
possesses them.

Our poet was a prodigious innovator in this as in so many other matters.
Of course, the idea and practice of musical interludes in plays was not
quite novel. In Shakespeare's early youth that remarkable artist in
language, John Lyly, had presented songs in several of his plays, and
these were notable for what his contemporary, Henry Upchear, called
"their labouring beauty." We may notice that Lyly's songs were not
printed till long after Shakespeare's death, but doubtless he had
listened to them. Peele and Greene had brilliant lyrical gifts, but they
did not exercise them in their dramas, nor did Lodge, whose novel of
Rosalynde (1590) contains the only two precedent songs which we could
willingly add to Shakespeare's juvenile repertory. But while I think it
would be rash to deny that the lyrics of Lodge and Lyly had their direct
influence on the style of Shakespeare, neither of those admirable
precursors conceived the possibility of making the Song an integral part
of the development of the drama. This was Shakespeare's invention, and
he applied it with a technical adroitness which had never been dreamed
of before and was never rivalled after.

This was not apprehended by the early critics of our divine poet, and
has never yet, perhaps, received all the attention it deserves. We may
find ourselves bewildered if we glance at what the eighteenth-century
commentators said, for instance, about the songs in _Twelfth Night_.
They called the adorable rhapsodies of the Clown "absurd" and
"unintelligible"; "O Mistress mine" was in their ears "meaningless";
"When that I was" appeared to them "degraded buffoonery." They did not
perceive the close and indispensable connection between the Clown's song
and the action of the piece, although the poet had been