highest facts and laws of human life. Shakspere set about attaining self-mastery, not of the petty, pedantic kind, which can be dictated by a director or described in a manual, but large, powerful, luminous, and calm; and by sustained effort he succeeded in attaining this in the end. It is impossible to conceive that Shakspere should have traversed life, and felt its insufficiencies and injuries and griefs, without incurring Timon's temptation-the temptation to fierce and barren resentment.

IV.

DOWDEN: Shakspere.

Alcibiades,

The whole conduct of Alcibiades forms a complete parallel to that of Coriolanus, and here again the connection between the two plays is obvious. Shakespeare found a brief account of the mutual relations of Timon and Alcibiades in North's translation of Plutarch's Life of Antony, together with a description of Timon's goodwill towards the general on account of the calamities that he foresaw he would bring upon the Athenians. The name of Alcibiades would not recall to Shakespeare, as it does to us, the most glorious period of Greek culture, and such names as Pericles, Aristophanes, and Plato-he generally gives Latin names to his Greeks, such as Lucius, Flavius, Servilius, etc.; nor did it represent to him the unrivalled subtlety, charm, instability, and reckless extravagance of the man. He would read Plutarch's comparison of Alcibiades and Coriolanus, in which the Greek and Roman generals are considered homogeneous, and for Shakespeare Alcibiades was merely the soldier and commander; on that account he let him occupy much the same relation to Timon that Fortinbras did to Hamlet.

Where Timon merely hates, Alcibiades seizes his weapons; and when Timon curses indiscriminately, Alcibiades punishes severely but deliberately. He does not

tear down the city walls and put every tenth citizen to the sword, as he is invited to do; he only seeks vengeance on his personal enemies and those whom he considers guilty. BRANDES: William Shakespeare.

V.

Apemantus.

The character of Apemantus seems designed, in part, on purpose to illustrate the difference between the intense hearty misanthropy of Timon and the low vulgar cynicism of an outworn profligate or superannuated debauchee. For in Apemantus we have a specimen of the cynic proper, who finds his pastime in a sort of scowling buffoonery and malignant slang; at first setting himself to practise the arts of a snarling scorner of men, because this feeds his distempered conceit; and then by dint of such exercise gradually working himself up into a corresponding passion. For it is easy to see that the cynicism which now forms his character originated in sheer affectation. Timon justly despises the sincere cant of one who thus drives contempt of mankind as a trade; for he knows it to be the offspring of disappointed vanity, seeking to indemnify its own baseness by making reprisals on others. He sees that Apemantus never had in himself a single touch of the goodness, the alleged want of which he so much delights to bark at; and that his superiority to the common passions of men is all because he has not virtue enough left to vicious.

HUDSON: The Works of Shakespeare.

VI.

Flavius.

An exception to this general picture of selfish depravity is found in the old and honest steward Flavius, to whom Timon pays a full tribute of tenderness. Shakespear

was unwilling to draw a picture "ugly all over with hypocrisy." He owed this character to the good-natured solicitations of his Muse. His mind might well have been said to be the "sphere of humanity."

HAZLITT: Characters of Shakespear's Plays.

Opposed to this friendship of semblance and falsehood, stands the true and warm affection of Timon's household, especially that of his steward Flavius, whom Timon declares the only honest man. In an over-civilized, morally corrupt state, where the senators are usurers, where the people abandon themselves to luxury and gluttony, and banish the more virtuous or leave them to perish from neglect, and where the army, accompanied by courtesans, takes up arms against its own country, the little of virtue and morality that is left takes refuge in the lowest orders. ULRICI: Shakspeare's Dramatic Art.

VII.

Blankness of Feature.

The want of individualisation of numerous persons in the play, named and unnamed, is a cause of apparent inferiority and infirmity; the forms of shabbiness are varied among the false friends, but not appropriated. Shabby tricks to save their money, and shabby means of obtaining it, do not suffice alone to mark out one mean man from another by absolute and necessary indication. Certainly it may be said that this blankness has some propriety in marking the herd as a herd; and accordingly, the omission of the names of individual friends at the last banquet of warm and steaming water, is quite consistent with the rest; but the play in which blankness of feature is so largely required or admissible, will lose in dignity, though it must be admitted that some of the scenes thus carried on between generic rather than indi

vidual personations-for instance, the opening dialogue of the Poet and the Painter, have all the appearance of being, from the first word to the last, entirely Shakespeare's. LLOYD: Critical Essays on the Plays of Shakespeare.

VIII.

The Non-Shakespearian Elements.

We must now, with a view to defining the non-Shakespearian elements of the play, devote some attention to its dual authorship. In the first act it is particularly the prose dialogues between Apemantus and others which seem unworthy of Shakespeare. The repartee is laconic but laboured-not always witty, though invariably bitter and disdainful. The style somewhat resembles that of the colloquies between Diogenes and Alexander in Lyly's Alexander and Campaspe. The first of Apemantus's conversations might have been written by Shakespeare-it seems to have some sort of continuity with the utterances of Thersites in Trolius and Cressida-but the second has every appearance of being either an interpolation by a strange hand, or a scene which Shakespeare had forgotten to score out. Flavius's monologue (I. ii.) never came from Shakespeare's pen in this form. Its marked contrast to the rest shows that it might be the outcome of notes taken by some blundering shorthand writer among the audience.

The long conversation, in the second act, between Apemantus, the Fool, Caphis, and various servants, was, in all probability written by an alien hand. It contains nothing but idle chatter devised to amuse the gallery, and it introduces characters who seem about to take some standing in the play, but who vanish immediately, leaving no trace. A Page comes with messages and letters from the mistress of a brothel, to which the Fool appears to belong, but we are told nothing of the contents of these letters, whose addresses the bearer is unable to read.

In the third act there is much that is feeble and irrelevant, together with an aimless unrest which incessantly pervades the stage. It is not until the banqueting scene towards the end of the act that Shakespeare makes his presence felt in the storm which bursts from Timon's lips. The powerful fourth act displays Shakespeare at his best and strongest; there is very little here which could be attributed to alien sources. I cannot understand the decision with which English critics (including a poet like Tennyson) have condemned as spurious Flavius's monologue at the close of the second scene. Its drift is that of the speech in the following scene, in which he expresses the whole spirit of the play in one line: "What viler things upon the earth than friends!" Although there is evidently some confusion in the third scene (for example, the intimation of the Poet's and Painter's appearance long before they really arrive), I cannot agree with Fleay that Shakespeare had no share in the passage contained between the lines, "Where liest o' nights, Timon? and Thou art the cap of all the fools alive." One speech in particular betrays the master-hand. It is that in which Timon expresses the wish that Apemantus's desire to become a beast among beasts may be fulfilled :

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"If thou wert the lion, the fox would beguile thee: if thou wert the lamb, the fox would eat thee: if thou wert the fox, the lion would suspect thee when, peradventure, thou wert accused by the ass: if thou wert the ass, thy dulness would torment thee: and still thou livedst but as a breakfast to the wolf: if thou wert the wolf, thy greediness would afflict thee, and oft thou shouldst hazard thy life for thy dinner."

There is as much knowledge of life here as in a concentrated essence of all Lafontaine's fables.

The last scenes of the fifth act were evidently never revised by Shakespeare. It is a comical incongruity that makes the soldier who, we are expressly told, is unable to read, capable of distinguishing Timon's tomb, and even