seas, but what appanage has ever been added to the British crown, so marvellously ordered throughout, or so inalienable, as the magnificent dominion shaped in twenty short years by the imperial faculty of the Stratford dramatist out of the seething elements of the 'new-birth'? With that dominion we could not part, were it to gain

'Another world

Of one entire and perfect chrysolite.'

The most patriotic of Roman poets, as he sang of the eternal city and her mission among men, claimed for her triumphs in war and government, but not in art:

'Excudent alii spirantia mollius aera;

Credo equidem; vivos ducent de marmore vultus;
Orabunt causas melius; coelique meatus
Describent radio, et surgentia sidera dicent:
Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento;
Hae tibi erunt artes; pacisque imponere morem
Parcere subjectis, et debellare superbos.'

With Shakspere for her own, England has to make no similar renunciation. To conquer and colonize is instinctive in the veins of the sea-kings' sons, but it was an unparalleled grace of fortune that predestined the mightiest Teutonic organizer of victory' to the creative, not the active sphere. The glories of the Armada and of Waterloo may be repeated, but whence shall be born a second Hamlet or Othello? How then take more fitting farewell of their creator than in his own words:

'Here was a Caesar! when comes such another?'

APPENDIX A.

The relation of Henry VI, Parts II and III to The First Parts of the Contention and The True Tragedy of Richard, Duke of York.

(This appendix is chiefly based on Miss J. Lee's paper on Parts II and III of Henry VI and their originals in the Transactions of the New Shakspere Society, 1875).

Parts II and III of Henry VI appeared for the first time in the Folio of 1623. They are recasts of two older quartos, The First Part of the Contention, published 1594, and The Tragedy of Richard, Duke of York, published 1595. Out of 3075 lines in Henry VI, Part II, some 520 were taken from The Contention without any change, and some 840 with but little alteration. In Part III, out of 2902 lines, about 1010 were transferred from The True Tragedy, besides 871 which were slightly altered. It has been asserted by some critics, of whom Mr. Fleay is the latest, that the quartos are merely imperfect transcripts of Henry VI, Parts II and III, instead of being earlier plays out of which the latter were developed. But there are conclusive reasons against this view: (1) The versification of The Contention and The True Tragedy belongs to the pre-Shaksperean era, and we should have to assume that the transcriber had mentally dropped back into the metrical style of an earlier period of dramatic poetry. (2) Particulars are related in The Contention and The True Tragedy of which there is no mention in Henry VI, Parts II and III, and which a transcriber would not have invented and inserted. (3) Some of the finest passages in Henry VI, Parts II and III are omitted in The Contention and The True Tragedy, though inferior lines occurring in the same speeches are given at length. It is incredible that a transcriber should have left out material of high poetic value while accurately reproducing far inferior stuff. There can thus be no doubt that the quartos are not merely spurious copies of Henry VI, Parts II and III.

But the more difficult question follows: Who wrote the four plays? The answers that have been given fall into the following chief groups. (a) Theobald, Johnson, Steevens, Knight, Schlegel and Tieck, followed in more recent times by Ulrici and Delius, ascribe all four plays to Shakspere. (b) Halliwell-Phillips, Clark and Wright, Grant White, and

Swinburne, consider that Shakspere wrote Henry VI, Parts II and III, and that he had a hand in the authorship of The Contention and The True Tragedy. Grant White, who has supported this view with much ability, holds that Shakspere wrote The Contention and The True Tragedy in partnership with Marlowe, Greene, and possibly Peele, and that in taking passages and sometimes whole scenes from these plays for his King Henry VI he did little more than reclaim his own. (c) Malone, Hallam, Collier, Gervinus, and Kreyssig consider that Shakspere wrote Henry VI, Parts II and III, but had no part in The Contention and The True Tragedy, which they ascribe to Marlowe or Greene. Miss J. Lee adopts a modified form of this view. She denies to Shakspere any share in The Contention and The True Tragedy, which she looks upon as the work of Marlowe and Greene (with the possible help of Peele), and she claims for Marlowe a share with Shakspere in Henry VI, Parts II and III. Her reasons for ascribing the authorship of the quartos solely to Marlowe and Greene are as follow: (1) The True Tragedy (and probably The Contention) were acted by Lord Pembroke's men, who produced none of Shakspere's plays. (2) They were published by Millington, and afterwards by Pavier, who printed none of Shakspere's undoubted works. (3) Neither the edition of 1594-95 nor of 1600 bore Shakspere's name, though none of his undoubted plays were issued anonymously after 1598. (4) Lord Pembroke's men performed plays by Greene and Marlowe. (5) Greene's attack upon Shakspere in the Groatsworth of Wit as 'the upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, with his Tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide,' implies that the younger man had appropriated work done by him and his friends. The italicized line is a parody of the line 'The tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide,' which occurs both in The True Tragedy and in Henry VI, Part III; and the most natural inference is that in the latter play and in Henry VI, Part II, Shakspere had adopted some of Greene's contributions to The True Tragedy and The Contention. It is probably to this that the writer of some lines entitled Greene's Funeralls refers, when he declares :

'Greene gave the ground to all that wrote upon him,
Nay more, the men that so eclipst his fame
Purloined his plumes: can they deny the same?'

(6) The scanty proportion of rhyme in The Contention and The True Tragedy points to Marlowe as one of their authors. (7) In both plays there are a number of grammatical constructions and turns of phrase which are common with Greene and Marlowe, but are seldom or never found in Shakspere's writings. (8) A number of lines are reproduced with little or no alteration from Marlowe's works, and there are remote allusions and proverbial sayings which have their parallels in Greene.

On these grounds Miss Lee ascribes The Contention and The True Tragedy to Marlowe and Greene, and attempts a division of plays in which, speaking broadly, she assigns the characters of King Henry VI, Beaufort, York, Suffolk, Margaret, Richard, and the Cliffords to Marlowe, and Duke

Humphrey, Eleanor, Clarence, Edward IV, Elizabeth and Jack Cade to Greene. She admits however that Cade has no prototype in Greene's undoubted works, and it is almost incredible that the creator of the Pinner of Wakefield should have given so unsympathetic a sketch of the representative of popular aspirations and grievances. The temper of the 'Cade' scenes is in complete harmony with Shakspere's treatment of mob-leaders, and if he had any hand in the old plays it is probably here that it is to be found.

That it was Shakspere who, out of these old plays, created Henry VI Parts II and III, cannot be doubted. Heminge and Condell would not have included them in the Folio of 1623 unless they knew for certain that Shakspere had written the chief portions of them; and moreover, in the Epilogue to Henry V the dramatist alludes to the events of Henry VI's reign

'Which oft our stage hath shewn, and for their sake
In your fair minds let this acceptance take.'

He thus asks for favour to his play of Henry V because a drama dealing
with Henry VI, and evidently written by himself had become popular.
Internal evidence confirms the Shaksperean authorship of the plays. Many
of the epithets and phrases which occur in them can be paralleled from
Shakspere's undoubted works. Dr. Furnivall has drawn attention to the
extensive use of animal metaphors and similes' in the plays, and is
inclined to question whether these are from Shakspere's hand. But other
of the dramatist's early works, especially the Lucrece, present something of
the same feature, which is due partly to recollections of Stratford life, and
still more to the predominant influence of Euphuism, whose most peculiar
note was the extravagant use of natural history for purposes of comparison.
But in the remodelling of The Contention and True Tragedy into
Henry VI, Parts II and III, Shakspere almost certainly had the help of
Marlowe, for a number of passages occur in the revised plays which bear
his stamp. The lines for instance in Part II of Henry VI (iv. 1) beginning,
'The gaudy, blabbing, and remorseful day,' must have been written by him,
or by some unusually successful imitator of his style. And the incorpo-
ration of so much of the older plays in the revised versions is more easily
accounted for on the assumption that Marlowe, who had the chief share in
The Contention and The True Tragedy, contributed certain portions to
Henry VI, Parts II and III.

APPENDIX B.

PERICLES.

HENRY VIII. THE TWO NOBLE KINSMEN.

To Shakspere's last period belong certainly two, probably three, plays, of which he was only in part author. PERICLES was published in 1609 in quarto, with an elaborate title-page, naming Shakspere as the writer, and stating that the play had been acted by 'His Majesty's Servants at the Globe.' Other quartos followed in 1611, 1619, 1630, and 1635. The play is omitted in the first two folios, but is introduced into that of 1664, with six other dramas, none of which are by Shakspere. Its appearance in this suspicious company might well throw doubt on its genuineness, for which the name of Shakspere on the quarto editions is an insufficient guarantee, owing to the fraudulent practice in vogue of recommending plays or poems to the public, by ascribing them to some favourite writer. Still the presumption is that a drama, acted by Shakspere's company, and issued with his name during his lifetime, was at any rate in part by him, and we find it expressly ascribed to him by Shephard in 1646, Tatham in 1652, and Dryden in his prologue to Davenant's Circe, 1677. Dryden's words are remarkable, for they explicitly speak of Pericles as one of Shakspere's earliest productions:

'Your Ben and Fletcher, in their first young flight,
Did no Volpone, nor no Arbaces write,
Shakspere's own Muse his Pericles first bore,
The Prince of Tyre was elder than the Moor.
'Tis miracle to see a first good play:

All hawthorns do not bloom on Christmas day.'

Yet when internal evidence is brought to bear upon the authorship of the play, we find that in so far as it supports Shakspere's claim, it proves the work to belong not to his first but his last period. The incidents of the birth of Marina at sea, her separation from her parents and ultimate recovery, and the restoration of Thaisa, as from the dead, to her husband's arms, are so strikingly similar to the events in The Winter's Tale that it is evident that the scenes in which they occur must have been written by the same author within the same period of his career. This is fully borne out