with these.  It is not with the most popular and famous names of his age that the sovereign name of Shakespeare is most properly or most profitably to be compared.  His genius has really far less in common with that of Jonson or of Fletcher than with that of Webster or of Dekker.  To the last-named poet even Lamb was for once less than just when he said of the “frantic Lover” in “Old Fortunatus” that “he talks pure Biron and Romeo; he is almost as poetical as they.”  The word “almost” should be supplanted by the word “fully”; and the criticism would then be no less adequate than apt.  Sidney himself might have applauded the verses which clothe with living music a passion as fervent and as fiery a fancy as his own.  Not even in the rapturous melodies of that matchless series of songs and sonnets which glorify the inseparable names of Astrophel and Stella will the fascinated student find a passage more enchanting than this: 

   Thou art a traitor to that white and red
     Which sitting on her cheeks (being Cupid’s throne)
   Is my heart’s sovereign:  O, when she is dead,
     This wonder, Beauty, shall be found in none. 
   Now Agripyne’s not mine, I vow to be
   In love with nothing but deformity. 
   O fair Deformity, I muse all eyes
   Are not enamoured of thee:  thou didst never
   Murder men’s hearts, or let them pine like wax,
   Melting against the sun of thy disdain;[1]
   Thou art a faithful nurse to Chastity;
   Thy beauty is not like to Agripyne’s,
   For cares, and age, and sickness, hers deface,
   But thine’s eternal:  O Deformity,
   Thy fairness is not like to Agripyne’s,
   For, dead, her beauty will no beauty have,
   But thy face looks most lovely in the grave.

[Footnote 1:  As even Lamb allowed the meaningless and immetrical word “destiny” to stand at the end of this line in place of the obviously right reading, it is not wonderful that all later editors of this passage should hitherto have done so.]

Shakespeare has nothing more exquisite in expression of passionate fancy, more earnest in emotion, more spontaneous in simplicity, more perfect in romantic inspiration.  But the poet’s besetting sin of laxity, his want of seriousness and steadiness, his idle, shambling, shifty way of writing, had power even then, in the very prime of his promise, to impede his progress and impair his chance of winning the race which he had set himself—­and yet which he had hardly set himself—­to run.  And if these things were done in the green tree, it was only too obvious what would be done in the dry; it must have been clear that this golden-tongued and gentle-hearted poet had not strength of spirit or fervor of ambition enough to put conscience into his work and resolution into his fancies.  But even from such headlong recklessness as he had already displayed no reader could have anticipated so singular a defiance of all form and order, all coherence and