impersonality is so cardinal a doctrine in the interpretation of his mind and art that much stronger reasons would be necessary to persuade one that he here removed the mask and showed his features to the world. Dowden calls the play a "comedy of disillusion," and notices "a striking resemblance in its spirit and structure to Timon of Athens". So, too, Furnivall, who pertinently contrasts the tone of the play with that of The Rape of Lucrece, ll. 1366-1568, when dealing with characters common to both. Boas, whose study of the play is the most complete and most satisfactory that I know, says, among many other things, "In the Lucrece Shakspere had introduced an elaborate description of the siege of Troy, and had there referred to Helen as 'the strumpet that began this stir'. The phrase gives us an important clue to Shakspere's motive for combining in one play the story of Troilus and Cressida and the broader theme of the conflict between Greece and Troy. Helen and Cressida are made to figure in exactly the same light. Both are heartless and disloyal, yet they awake a devotion of which they are utterly unworthy. The infatuation of Troilus is paralleled by that of Menelaus and Paris whom Diomed cynically classes together as equally deserving of Helen :

He merits well to have her, that doth seek her,
Not making any scruple of her soilure,
With such a hell of pain and world of charge,
And you as well to keep her, that defend her,
Not palating the taste of her dishonour,

With such a costly loss of wealth and friends.

But Helen not only throws a spell over her individual lovers; she brings two nations into conflict for the sake of her beaux yeux. As Diomed asserts :

For every false drop in her bawdy veins

A Grecian's life hath sunk: for every scruple

Of her contaminated carrion weight

A Trojan hath been slain.

Hector makes a similar statement in the Trojan council when he urges the surrender of Helen as the price of peace. In his eyes 'she is not worth what she doth cost the holding':

"Tis mad idolatry

To make the service greater than the god,
And the will dotes, that is inclinable

To what infectiously itself affects

Without some image of the affected merit.

These lines strike the very keynote of the play, and knit together the two plots. The 'mad idolatry that makes the service greater than the god' is exemplified in the one on a personal, in the latter on a national scale. Troilus is infected by the mania as virulently as in his private character. His rhapsodies over Cressida are not more glowing than over Helen, the

Grecian queen, whose youth and freshness

Wrinkles Apollo and makes stale the morning.

For her sake he, and, as is natural, Paris, are eager to risk the welfare of the entire Trojan state, and Hector, though he holds that 'the moral laws of nature and of nation demand her restoration, yields to the impetuous counsels of his younger brothers and confesses that he has already sent 'a roisting challenge' among the Greeks. The debate moves throughout in the circle, not of antique, but of mediæval ideas. It illustrates and implicitly condemns the quixotic sacrifice of great national interests to a fantastic code of exaggerated gallantry." . Much more of this

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writer's admirable examination of the play I should like to quote, but can only advise those interested in the problem to study the whole of the chapter in which it is discussed by him. On the whole I think my own view, put shortly, is that being in a moody spirit and having, upon whatever prompting, taken the most cynical view of Cressida's character, Shakespeare "set down the keys that made the music" of the Homeric heroes whom he brought into the story, and giving prominence to the fact that the war was waged for "a cuckold and a whore," held cheap those who would fight upon such an argument. But the more I ponder the play, the more do I feel that, though Fleay may have laid down lines too hard and fast, there must have been some considerable revision, and that the "third story" of his division could not have belonged to the drama in its original form.

While the critics differ as to the meaning of the play, they are also at variance in regard to the greater or less skill with which the several characters are delineated. Thus Godwin writes, "But the great beauty of this play, as it is of all the genuine writings of Shakespeare . . . is that his men are men; his sentiments are living, and his characters marked with those delicate, evanescent, undefinable touches which identify them with the great delineation of nature". Again, Verplanck says, "Nor is there any drama more rich in variety and truth of character. The Grecian camp is filled with real and living men of all sorts of temper and talent.” Grant White, on the other hand, notices “a singular lack of that peculiar characteristic of Shakespeare's dramatic style, the marked distinction

and nice discrimination of the individual traits, mental and moral, of the various personages. . . . The thoughtful reader will observe that Ulysses pervades the serious parts of the play, which is all Ulyssean in its thoughts and language. For example, no two men could be more unlike in character than Achilles and Ulysses, and yet the former having asked the latter what he is reading, he, uttering his own thoughts, says as follows with the subsequent reply:

Ulysses.

Achilles.

A strange fellow here
Writes me: That man, how dearly ever parted,
How much in having, or without, or in,
Cannot make boast to have that which he hath,
Nor feels not what he owes but by reflection;
As when his virtues shining upon others
Heat them, and they retort that heat again
To the first giver.

This is not strange, Ulysses.
The beauty that is borne here in the face
The bearer knows not, but commends itself
To others' eyes: nor doth the eye itself,
That most pure spirit of sense, behold itself,
Not going from itself; but eye to eye oppos'd
Salutes each other with each other's form;
For speculation turns not to itself

Till it hath travell'd, and is mirror'd there

Where it may see itself. This is not strange at all.

Now these speeches are made of the same metal and coined in the same mint; and they both of them have the image and superscription of William Shakespeare. No words or thoughts could be more unsuited to that bold, bloody egoist, 'the broad Achilles,' than the reply he makes to Ulysses; but here Shakespeare was merely using the Greek champion as a lay figure to utter his own thoughts, which

are perfectly in character with the son of Autolycus. Ulysses thus flows over the whole serious part of the play. Agamemnon, Nestor, Æneas and the rest all talk alike, and all like Ulysses." This similarity of tone and temperament cannot, it seems to me, be denied. Yet to admit it is to admit that Shakespeare has for once failed in what was the most distinctive mark of his superiority over all his compeers, and that too in a play in which intellect is at its highest; which displays the profoundest practical wisdom, the keenest insight into the motives and impulses of human nature. Surely we have here another incongruity added to the enigmas which baffle us in the general scheme.

The duration of the action of this play is thus stated by Mr. P. A. Daniel:

Day 1. Act I. sc. i. and ii.

Interval: the long-continued truce [I. iii. 261, 262].

3. Act IV., Act v. sc. i. and first part of sc. ii.

4. Act v. the latter part of sc. ii. and sc. iii.-x.

But Mr. Daniel further points out certain discrepancies, among which the following may be specially noticed :

“Act II. sc. iii. In the Grecian camp, before the tent of Achilles. The commanders 'rub the vein' of Ajax. Achilles declines to see them, but through Ulysses informs them that he will not to the field to-morrow (1. 171). At the end of the scene Ulysses remarks:

To-morrow

We must with all our main of power stand fast (11. 268-9).