which gain in point and humour when read in this light. Alexander's elaborate description of Ajax in i. 1. 18-31 applies at least as well to Jonson;1 'rank' Thersites with his mastic jaws' looks very like a reference to the flagellant Dekker of the Satiromastix, whom Jonson himself had called 'one of the most overflowing rank wits of Rome'; and the burlesque upon Homeric heroes would have a certain point as a rejoinder to Jonson's satirical travesty of Augustan poets.

It is equally clear, however, that in their present state, and as a whole, these scenes cannot be regarded either as an attack upon Jonson, or as even a distant reflection of the 'battle of the Theatres.' If the 'dull, brainless' Ajax, whom Ulysses befools and who replies with inarticulate oaths and curses to Thersites' biting gibes, was meant to ridicule the most powerful intellect, next to Shakespeare's own, then engaged in the drama, satire never more egregiously missed its mark, or better deserved to be flung back upon the satirist. Moreover, if Shakespeare intervened on Dekker's side, the portrait of Thersites was a singular mode of defending his ally. That Shakespeare should have condescended, in the year of Hamlet, to make his art the vehicle of a serious personal attack, is in any case hardly credible. But the battle of the theatres had its ludicrous aspects, and he may have availed himself of the machinery provided by the Iliad to exhibit these from the standpoint of a genial. Olympian, whose large humanity apprehended the strength and weakness of the combatants better than

of a most divine temper, one in whom the humours and elements are peaceably met,' to which he regards it as a good-humoured reply.'

they did themselves. Ajax and Thersites may still figure the feud of Jonson and Dekker, but Ajax is Dekker's Jonson, and Thersites is Jonson's Dekker, and half the comedy consists in the grossness of the travesty.

In this sense the bout between

But it is impossible to suppose that work so instinct with Shakespeare's maturest powers as the finest campscenes could have had merely a temporary or topical intention. These must have acquired their present form as integral portions of the drama of Troilus and Cressida, and have been brought at some point into a more vital relation with the Troilus and Cressida story than they can ever have possessed as mere portions of the plot. The bright bubble of Cressida's love which dazzles and seduces Troilus and finally breaks before his eyes as he watches with Ulysses at Cressida's tent (v. 2.), has its counterpart in other bubbles-some more magnificent, some more sordid -which here flutter before the eyes of heroes, and touch their heroism with fatuity like his. Woman's love throughout the play appears as a fatal spell, emasculating valour, consuming the 'heart' that spurs men forth to battle. Troilus' opening words strike

the keynote :

Each Trojan that is master of his heart,

Let him to field; Troilus, alas! hath none.

He recovers his heart and his valour only when Cressida is no longer his. Helen is a more seductive Cressida, and Paris a more effeminate Troilus; Achilles is 'thwarted' from his great purpose to do battle with Hector by a previous engagement with Polyxena (v. 1.); Hector himself, arming for the field, has sternly to silence a foolishly protesting Andromache, whose proper place is in the women's quarters (whither she is peremptorily sent), not by her husband's side

(v. 3.). Of the love that ennobles and inspires there is nowhere any glimpse. The sense of the disasters that come from women, which underlies Measure for Measure and Antony and Cleopatra, is as pervading here, though it is exhibited rather in a diffusion of ignoble or grotesque blots and scars than in such abysmal collapse or sublime ruin as those of Angelo and Antony.

But Troilus and Cressida differs from the greatest of the Roman tragedies in so far as the atmosphere of illusion and fatuity embraces the masters of statecraft and war who are exempt from love. The cold Octavius, who gathers Antony's neglected harvest, does not greatly interest Shakespeare, but his cool mastery of all the elements of his colossal task, his perfect adaptation of means to ends, the absolute precision of his workmanship in the building up of empire, receives its meed of recognition from the successful player who had bought 'the best house in Stratford town.' Just these qualities of proportion and solidity are glaringly absent in the camps of the Shakespearean Greeks and Trojans. The heroes of both camps are superb figures, magnificently endowed with valour or with eloquence or with wisdom; but in each there lurks 'the little rift within the lute,' and these imposing impersonations of heroism are touched with an air of solemn futility. Achilles is eloquent, but his divine wrath has sunk into a foppish fume, his cruelty into the cowardly baseness which permits him to fall with all his myrmidons upon the unarmed Hector.

Hector himself is a nobler figure, and yet chivalry is made ridiculous in Hector's challenge to Ajax, in the jealous intrigues it occasions, and in his solemn withdrawal at the last moment out of pious regard for the blood of his 'sacred aunt' flowing in Ajax's veins.

And militant patriotism is made ridiculous in Hector's abrupt revulsion from the opinion that Helen must be restored, to the opinion that she must be kept :

Hector's opinion

Is this in way of truth; yet ne'ertheless,

My spritely brethren, I propend to you
In resolution to keep Helen still,

For 'tis a cause that hath no mean dependance
Upon our joint and several dignities.

No such gross flaws mar the clear beauty of Ulysses and Nestor. Ulysses is the mouthpiece of Shakespeare's ripest political wisdom; his speech is packed with golden, memorable, and well-remembered sayings. He is 'the physician of the iron age,' and not only lays his finger with faultless precision on the ailing place, as in his great harangue in counsel (i. 3.) and his still loftier apologue to Achilles (iii. 3.), but actually applies the cauterising cure, when he leads Troilus to his disillusion at the tent of Cressida. Yet even the wisdom of Ulysses has a background of unreason; and the jeers of the base and brutal Thersites at the 'war for a placket' do not entirely miss their application to any one concerned in it. The master of civil wisdom and mature statecraft is a leader in the fantastic and legendary politics of the Trojan war; and his magnificent exposition of the conditions of an ordered polity receives an ironical commentary from the situation, when spoken to the chiefs of a nation upheaved to recover an eloped wife, in the midst of their thousand ships 'launched by a face.'