fantastic and artificial after the direct and almost tragic force of much in the Merchant of Venice. This delightful play is almost as much a fairy-tale as the Midsummer Night's Dream, if improbability of incident, and a Forest of Arden, with lionesses and serpents, and other such fantastic adjuncts, make up fairyland. It is indeed the land of pastoral poetry, which is to all intents and purposes no man's land." The play is (like the Winter's Tale) a dramatised novel. The novel, called Rosalynde, by Thomas Lodge, dramatist and general literary craftsman in prose and verse, had been published nearly ten years, and become very popular, when Shakspeare adopted it. Lodge's romance, in prose interspersed with songs and sonnets, was imitated, like Sidney's Arcadia, from the Italian and Spanish pastoral writers, one of the innumerable variations upon a theme-the supposed happy life of shepherds and shepherdesses -which, first made popular at the Renaissance in the idylls of Theocritus and Virgil, had fascinated in extraordinary degree the imagination of Europe, and had rapidly spread through all countries, infecting all literatures, like an intellectual influenza. The fashion did not pass away so soon as many epidemics, for it survived in various shapes until late in the last century, and may be tracked still in those little Watteau-like groups in Dresden china that still adorn many a best parlour in a country house. Here, again, as in Love's Labour's Lost, we find Shakspeare the

satirist of a "fad." Lodge's Rosalynde was written to meet the unfailing demand for pastoral romance. Shakspeare adopted it for the purposes of his own genius, recognising doubtless the real poetic and dramatic capabilities of the story, but seeing also with his all-embracing sense of humour an opportunity for satirising what was unreal in the pastoral mania. In Lodge's romance there is no satire-no Touchstone to act as the exquisite running commentary, or chorus, upon the preposterous dream that able-bodied young men and women of education could wisely leave the duties of social life to make love under hawthorn hedges, and watch their flocks, under skies that were always sunny. "And how like you this shepherd's life, Master Touchstone?" "Truly, shepherd, in respect of itself, it is a good life; but in respect that it is a shepherd's life, it is naught. In respect that it is solitary, I like it very well; but in respect that it is private, it is a very vile life. Now, in respect that it is in the fields, it pleaseth me very well; but in respect that it is not in the court, it is tedious. As it is a spare life, look you, it fits my humour well; but as there is no more plenty in it, it goes much against my stomach."

I am dealing with such changes in Shakspeare's art, that is to say in the way he dealt with his materials, during the period covered by the composition of his plays. And in so doing, it would seem obvious to consider the plots of his dramas; for more and more in our own days does

the plot affect our judgment of a play or a story. Clever construction, ingenious imbroglio, novel and startling incident, are the qualities that nowadays make the fortune of an author (or his publisher), not characterisation, humour, poetry, and the sweet human atmosphere that envelops the whole. And the consequence is that originality in the matter of plot is watched for with a rigorous jealousy. If the startling incident-some novel and ghastly use of Nature's secrets-turns out to have been used before, or not to have been invented by the artist using it, there at once "begins the scandal and the cry." Only the other day the lady author of an admirable story of child-life was severely handled because another book, never heard of, contained two or three of the same incidents; and actually it was considered worth fighting out the battle in the newspapersa curious, but instructive, comment upon the change that has come over our standards of artistic value. In the really palmy days of literature such charges of plagiarism were unheard of; and we (such hypocrites or so inconsistent we are) pretend that they did not signify then, though they signify apparently so much now. In this matter of plagiarism, so called, let it be understood once for all that it is not where a man finds his material that determines his originality, but what he does with his material when he has got it. Shakspeare (as far as we know) originated but one plot in his life. Sometimes he

took a previously written and acted play; sometimes an existing romance from the French or Italian in prose or verse; sometimes an episode of chronicle-history from Holinshed, or a biography from Plutarch; sometimes a hackneyed anecdote from some popular chap - book. And it is abundantly evident that the plagiarist, so far from showing any desire to conceal his theft, actually chose those themes because they were already so widely known. The modern plagiarist steals when he thinks the theft will escape notice. It was the other way about with Shakspeare. He stole because the material had already proved itself attractive, and was therefore likely to attract further notice in its new dress. And how new that dress was! His raw material was in most cases, as we have the means of verifying, “raw' indeed. When poor Mr. Baps, the dancingmaster in Dombey and Son, who dabbled in political economy and was always boring his friends with it, asked Mr. Toots at Dr. Blimber's party: "What are you to do with your raw material when it comes into your ports in exchange for your drain of gold?" Mr. Toots suggested, "Cook 'em," an answer that failed to satisfy Mr. Baps. But it is precisely what Shakspeare did with his raw material, and we all know with what magnificent gastronomic results!

Therefore, in one sense, we cannot trace the growth of Shakspeare's art or humour by the

stories he invented, for in their general outline he did not invent them. Nor can we put it that he chose better and better plots as he advanced in experience and judgment. In tragedy he always chose, even from the first, stories with splendid opportunities. The very names of Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, Lear, assure us of that, and Romeo and Juliet, a much earlier play, is no exception. But in comedy, it must be allowed, he was not always so fortunate. The stories of Measure for Measure, All's Well that Ends Well, Cymbeline, if we first heard them related in unvarnished prose, might not seem to any of us either pleasant or hopeful material for a comedy. And we have only to imagine how such stories would have fared if treated by a second-class imagination, to be struck once more with the extraordinary firstclass quality of Shakspeare's. The incidents are often so exasperatingly disagreeable, in themselves, that we wonder how a dramatist, who had a large range of Italian fiction current in England to choose from, should have been attracted to them. We feel this now and then, I fancy, even in his most favourite comedies. To many, I think, the pleasure derived from Much Ado about Nothingas to the greater part of which, the Beatrice and Benedick part, and the Dogberry and Verges part, we should all agree that Shakspeare is at his very best the pleasure of these, I say, is hindered by the secondary plot, dealing with the false charge against Hero, where the silliness and