to have first taken hold of Henry VI., and thus to have opened the vista of those magnificent poetic Histories, the creating of which constitutes Shakespeare the great National Poet of England. Two plays of Henry VI. by Robert Greene were the foundation on which he built his Henry VI. In this reconstruction, many times the creative maker breaks through the playwright's craft.

To the potential poetic dramatist a most vivacious apprenticeship is this furbishing, redressing, of other men's dramatic work, which only a poet's hand can do effectively. The want of poetry in these plays was the disabling want in them; thence, like hundreds of others, they had fallen into discredit, and lay unpresentable and lifeless. Into them young Shakespeare breathed some of the breath of poetic life, that breath whereby alone can high literature, be kept alive. He re-animated them; and only a Shakespeare could do that vital act..

But while remodeling and vitalizing the plays of others, the aspiring poet would be naturally with his exuberant power we might say irresistibly impelled to try an unassisted flight into the realm of drama.

.Two Gentlemen of Verona and Love's Labor Lost bear clear internal evidence of having been written in the earlier years of his brilliant dramatic career; and they are wholly his. Nor has there been found for Titus Andronicus any earlier play than the one ascribed to Shakespeare. Only by tradition is it claimed that he wrought after a model. Το Coleridge internal evidence proves Titus Andronicus to be not Shakespeare's except in passages; and it were hard to find a shrewder judge of that kind of evidence than Coleridge. The quick succession of bloody horrors, that are the chief incidents of the piece, are by some made an argument against its being by Shakespeare. But may not the young Titan have felt, and chosen to indulge, an impulse to outbloat Marlow and Kyd? To me the flow and texture of the verse do not seem quite those of the young poet who was already the author of Venus and Adonis, and Lucrece. In the characters, incidents, and verse there is an unshakespearean shallowness. A cardinal feature of Shakespeare's individuality, and a token of its greatness, is, under inward pressure of imaginative thought, to dip below the surface. In the lines of Titus Andronicus

one misses, too, that flashing into figures of speech which gives to Shakespeare's pages such a bloom. We cannot believe that he could have originally written five acts of shallow horrors, where the killing of men seems to be committed with as little quickening of the pulse as the slaying of oxen in a slaughterhouse; where, save Lavinia, there is not a personage sympathy towards whom would not be a wasteful perversity. That Shakespeare even took in hand such monsters, to put a little poetic fire here and there into their ferocity, could only be from a half-frolicksome impulse of vaunt, to show that the young Hercules, even with his unknit sinews, wielded a club Iwith which he could knock on the head the most savage of his bloody-penned contemporaries, and bespatter with their brains the pavement of degenerate Rome. Or did he not undertake to deepen the horrors of Titus Andronicus, in order to make the whole piece a surer irony of the raw-head and bloody-bones style of drama fashionable when he first came to London? Perhaps this is the best way of accounting for the connection of even Shakespeare's youthful name with such pseudo-tragic, unpoetic scenes.

Except what he did for Henry VI. (which had for him the healthy fragrance of nationality), Titus Andronicus stands isolated among the dramas of his first period. Tragedy need not be uncongenial to youthful dramatic genius; but historic drama demands a maturity. of understanding and experience of life which only three or four decades can give.

By a petition of the sharers in the Blackfriars Theatre to the Privy Council in 1589, made acquainted with the important fact that in that year Shakespeare was one of the shareholders, we are prompted to ask, Might not his name have appeared in the petition had it been dated November, 1588, instead of November, 1589? For believing in this possibility we have warrant by what we positively know of his talents, his genius, and his industry. Through these he could not but make rapid progress when once on the broad, lively arena so suited to the fullest exhibition of his immense and varied powers. In a couple of years he might easily have earned the place of a sharer. The year 1588 was the year of the Spanish Armada, that ostentatious but most formidable enterprise aimed at the very national being of England; and it is a pleasant thought,

that, while English seamanship, courage, manhood, heroism, were dealing, in the Channel near by, deadly blows to this arrogant, portentous monster, in London the air was just beginning to vibrate to the chords of that new music of thoughtful speech that was gradually to swell into richest, deepest, most sonorous harmonies, worthy to be the chief glory of the English mind. It is not at all capriciously fanciful to suppose that, on the very days when Frobisher and Drake and Hawkins with gun, sword, and pike, were striking deep wounds into that proud, menacing colossus, the Spanish Empire, and thus, while saving the political power of England from overthrow, were strengthening for all Christendom the foundations of civil and religious freedom, Shakespeare, then in his twenty-fifth year, was with hopeful joy writing down the first scenes of his first original drama, — say of Two Gentlemen of Verona, or Love's Labor Lost, and thus announcing the poetical primacy of England among modern nations.

In both of these comedies we have the fragrant promise of the bountiful fruits of their author's after-growth. Of course, marks of immaturity are palpable; the characters are not yet definitely outlined or cunningly drawn, the