this astonishing natural disposition of mind wonderful results have been produced.  But this disposition is generally defined as Balzac’s great fault.  More properly speaking, it is exactly his great distinctive duality.  But who can boast of being so happily gifted, and of being able to apply a method which may permit him to invest—­and that with a sure hand—­what is purely trivial with splendour and imperial purple?  Who can do this?  Now, he who does not, to speak the truth, does no great thing.”

Nor was any very great thing done by the author of A Warning for Fair Women.

{141} I do not know or remember in the whole radiant range of Elizabethan drama more than one parallel tribute to that paid in this play by an English poet to the yet foreign art of painting, through the eloquent mouth of this enthusiastic villain of genius, whom we might regard as a more genuinely Titianic sort of Wainwright.  The parallel passage is that most lovely and fervid of all imaginative panegyrics on this art, extracted by Lamb from the comedy of Doctor Dodipoll; which saw the light or twilight of publication just eight years later than Arden of Feversham.

{154} I remember to have somewhere at some time fallen in with some remark by some commentator to some such effect as this:  that it would be somewhat difficult to excuse the unwomanly violence of this demand.  Doubtless it would.  And doubtless it would be somewhat more than difficult to extenuate the unmaidenly indelicacy of Jeanne Darc.

{179} What would at least be partly lust in another man is all but purely hatred in Iago.

            Now I do love her too: 
   Not out of absolute lust, (though, peradventure,
   I stand accountant for as great a sin)
   But partly led to diet my revenge.

For “partly” read “wholly,” and for “peradventure” read “assuredly,” and the incarnate father of lies, made manifest in the flesh, here speaks all but all the truth for once, to himself alone.

{205} I add the proof in a footnote, so as to take up no more than a small necessary space of my text with the establishment of a fact which yet can seem insignificant to no mortal who has a human ear for lyric song.  Shakespeare’s verse, as all the wide world knows, ends thus: 

But my kisses bring again,
bring again,
Seals of love, but sealed in vain,
sealed in vain.

The echo has been dropped by Fletcher, who has thus achieved the remarkable musical feat of turning a nightingale’s note into a sparrow’s.  The mutilation of Philomela by the hands of Tereus was a jest compared to the mutilation of Shakespeare by the hands of Fletcher:  who thereby reduced the close of the first verse into agreement if not into accordance with the close of his own.  This appended verse, as all the world does not and need not know, ends thus: 

But first set my poor heart free,
Bound in those icy chains by thee.