inferior power, are imitative in their first essays. They, like others, may attempt at first some new, strange thing; they may possibly strive to be original, although they are less likely to do so than the smaller and weaker men. For a seeking after originality is one of the sure accompaniments, or at least one of the unmistakable tokens, of a felt although perhaps an unconscious mental weakness. To original creative minds their originality and their creative powers come spontaneously and by a development more or less slow, and the originality always comes unsought. In the early work of even such strong, original minds in art as Raphael and Michael Angelo, Mozart and Beethoven, we find not only traces of their predecessors, but such absolute assimilation to them in form and in spirit that were it not for slight touches, manifestly in the least labored and least purposed passages, we could believe them the productions of some one of their elder contemporaries.

In the Second and Third Parts of "King Henry VI.,” therefore, and in “Richard III.," which contain the earliest of his historical works, we find traces of the principal dramatic poets whom he found in possession of the stage when he took to it for a living. Marlowe and Peele are those who seem to have impressed him most. A likeness to both these, and largely to Peele, appears in "Richard III.,” which, although (because of its rapid recurrence of exciting scenes and incidents, its turbulent action, and the centring of the interest upon one chief personage) it is the greatest favorite of all the histories for the stage, is yet the poorest and thinnest in thought, the least free and harmonious in rhythm in a word, the least Shakespearean of them all. Compare it with "Richard II.,"

which was written a year or two after it, and in which Shakespeare seems to have taken his first great step toward originality in style and in the treatment of his material. As not unfrequently happens in such cases, he went too far, and produced a play the very reverse in style and spirit of "Richard III." It is a tragic dramatic poem rather than an historical play. The action, which in the earlier history of the later Richard is so vivid, lags; the movement is languid, and passages of reflection and contemplation abound. It has passages which are somewhat in Shakespeare's early and constrained manner both as to thought and versification. Such are these:

Old John of Gaunt, time-honour'd Lancaster,
Hast thou, according to thy oath and band,
Brought hither Henry Hereford thy bold son,
Here to make good the boisterous late appeal,
Which then our leisure would not let us hear,
Against the Duke of Norfolk, Thomas Mowbray ?

Alas, the part I had in Glou'ster's blood
Doth more solicit me than your exclaims,
To stir against the butchers of his life!
But since correction lieth in those hands
Which made the fault that we cannot correct,
Put we our quarrel to the will of heaven;
Who, when they see the hours ripe on earth,
Will rain hot vengeance on offenders' heads.

Act I. Sc. 1.

Act I. Sc. 2.

Compare these passages with the blank verse of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and "The Two Gentlemen of Verona," and see the similarity between them; not, of course, in the thoughts, but in the manner of thought and in the rhythm. Observe, in all, the frequency of the pause at the end of the line; the sense and the rhythm drooping together, These traits and the frequent recurrence of rhymed pas

sages and of couplets in rhyme at the close of speeches in blank verse, a style of ending sometimes called tag-rhymes, might lead a reader with whom the external and material had more weight than the internal and spiritual to infer that "Richard II." was the earliest in production of all Shakespeare's historical plays, before even "Richard III.," — as it is of all those which are wholly original. But such traits, although they are of some value as guides in deciding the question of the succession in which Shakespeare's plays were produced, and so as to the order in which they should be read by those who wish to follow the development of his genius, are of an inferior order, and cannot be relied upon. Their evidence is to be accepted as confirmatory or accessory, and should be reckoned as a part only of that which must be taken into consideration. For it could not be relied upon, even should we set aside all other as of no account. Thus, for example, the tag-rhymes in "Love's Labour's Lost" and "The Two Gentlemen of Verona" are very few in comparison with those in "Richard II." and "Richard III.," although the comedies were produced at about the same time as the histories and unquestionably before them. As to the order of production, such passages as the following are of great weight:

To please the king I did; to please myself
I cannot do it. Yet I know no cause
Why I should welcome such a guest as grief,
Save bidding farewell to so sweet a guest
As my sweet Richard. Yet again, methinks,
Some unborn sorrow, ripe in fortune's womb,
Is coming towards me; and my inward soul
With nothing trembles: at some thing it grieves
More than with parting from my lord the king.

Act II. Sc. 2.

Glad am I that your highness is so arm'd
To bear the tidings of calamity.

Like an unseasonable stormy day,

Which makes the silver rivers drown their shores

As if the world were all dissolved to tears,

So high above his limits swells the rage

Of Bolingbroke, covering your fearful land

With hard bright steel, and hearts harder than steel.
White beards have arm'd their thin and hairless scalps
Against thy majesty; and boys with women's voices
Strive to speak big, and clap their female joints

In stiff unwieldy arms against thy crown.
Thy very beadsmen learn to bend their bows
Of double fatal yew against thy state.
Yea, distaff-women manage rusty bills
Against thy seat. Both young and old rebel,
And all goes worse than I have power to tell.
Act III. Sc. 2.

Compare these with any parts of the four plays that we took up for examination in our previous section, and see in them unmistakable evidence of greater maturity of thought, freer command of language, more skilful construction of verse. There can be no doubt, I think, that they are the product of Shakespeare's mind at its first attainment of free and independent action, while, however, other passages in the same play show that it was yet somewhat restrained in its action by a memory of his predecessors and by the influence of his contemporaries.

It would be well, therefore, to begin acquaintance with Shakespeare's historical plays by reading the mixed play "Richard III." first, then "Richard II.,” and then "King John." This, it will be seen, reverses the order of these histories according to the chronology of their events, which would place "King John" first and "Richard III." last of these three, and of all the histories except "Henry VIII.;' which is the order in which they have always been printed. But chronology should be entirely disre

garded by the student, and even by the general reader of Shakespeare's plays. He took very little thought of it himself; and only the "Henry VI." series and "Richard III." have any connection or relations of interdependence. Indeed, as to historical fact, the histories are in some cases inconsistent with each other; but it is in minor and unessential fact which does not affect the dramatic motive of the play. Such points as this are not to be regarded by the reader of Shakespeare, whether in historical play, tragedy founded upon history, or in comedy. In all alike Shakespeare regarded his facts, i. e., the story, as mere material on which he was to work. He was as indifferent in regard to anachronism as he was in regard to the unities of time and place.

Nothing, however, affecting Shakespeare's mental development or his dramatic art can be inferred from his practice in these respects. The unities of time and place, for example, are preserved in his first two plays, "Love's Labour's Lost" and "The Comedy of Errors," absolutely; in his third, "A MidsummerNight's Dream," he began that disregard of them which he observed throughout his career, and which culminates in "The Winter's Tale," one of his very latest plays, in which the very semblance of them is so disregarded that it affects to a certain degree even a reader's enjoyment of it. But on the other hand, in "The Tempest," written in the same year, or at least the same twelvemonth, as "The Winter's Tale," the unities of time and place are observed with a strictness which cannot be surpassed.

I do wrong to say that they are observed, which implies purpose on the part of the dramatist; and nothing is clearer to me, the more I read and re