duced Lords Lucius and Lucullus by name, now adds Sempronius to them, increases the number of servants to three, sends them off to these three Lords, and leaves the messages to the Senators and Ventidius for the steward.

:

Note also that he sends to each of these friends for 50 talents a piece but I do not enter on the question of the moneys in this part of my paper. It is sufficient here to mention that the verse part of the scene is pure Shakespeare. No one else could have written it. The "drunken spilth of wine," the "one cloud of Winter showres, These flyes are coucht," the "halfe-caps and cold mouing nods, They froze me into silence," bear the lawful stamp of his mintage.

But next come three short scenes in which we find the three servants, Flaminius, Servilius, and Anonymus, applying to Lords Lucius, Lucullus, and Sempronius, in detail; but the most dramatic situation of all, the application of the steward (Flavius, according to this writer) to Ventigius, is not given, only alluded to. In these scenes there is not a spark of Shakespeare's poetry, not a vestige of his style; and they are inseparably tied up with the prose bit in Act ii. Sc. 2, which we have just rejected. As a specimen of style, take the following, arranged to show the monotony of the pauses :

"Why, this is the worlds soule;
And iust of the same peece

Is euery Flatterers sport.
Who can call him his Friend,

That dips in the same dish?"

And in Act iii. Sc. 4, where the creditors again dun Timon, there is no trace of Shakespeare. Timon gets in a vulgar passion; he bids to a banquet the three apocryphal Lords, Lucius, Lucullus, and Sempronius; the rest of the scene is taken up with the talk of the creditors' servants, who can rhyme much more easily than the best educated personages in the Shakespeare part of the play, and are thus far poetic, if not dramatic. I need give no specimen of their speeches: they speak the same dialect, and use the same. rhetoric, as all the characters of the second author; any speech of any one might be spoken by any other, so far as the language and form of expression are concerned. It will suffice to give a

bit from the Alcibiades of the next scene, which is one wholly by

the vamper :

“Why do fond men expose themselues to Battell

And not endure all threats? Sleepe vpon 't,

And let the Foes quietly cut their Throats

Without repugnancy? If there be

Such Valour in the bearing, what make wee abroad?"

I am tired of reiterating that these scenes by author the second add nothing to the progress of the play.

But I must notice the difference in the enumeration of the servants here and in Act ii. Sc. 2. In the earlier scene the only ones present are Caphis and the servants of Isidore and Varro; in the latter there are Lucius, Titus, Hortensis, Philotus, and Varro's two men (unnecessary doubling, a sure sign of inferiority); and it is expressly stated in the stage direction that all Timon's creditors are present. This scene cannot have emanated from the same hand as the former; but the former agrees with other portions of the Shakespeare part of the play, the latter scene does not. Compare, for instance, Act ii. Sc. 1. "To Varro and to Isidore," and a little further on, 86 "Caphis hoa!" which exhausts the Shakespearian list. But to pass on.

In Act iii. Sc. 6 Timon's speech is certainly Shakespeare's ; for example :

"This is Timons last.

[He] Who stucke and spangled you with Flatteries,

Washes it off, and sprinkles in your faces

Your reeking villany.”

An inferior author would not have thought of the flattery Timon had used to his false friends, but of their adulations to him, and would have written

But the rest of the scene is certainly not Shakespeare's. It is a muddle. There seem to be two Lords on the stage at first (taken from the two in Act i. Sc. 1), whom Timon calls "gentlemen both": the other Lords who speak after must be part of his "attendants"

there are senators who don't speak at all. Timon throws warm water at them, which apparently freezes before it reaches them, so that they feel it on their bones, and are pelted with stones, like the guests in the old Timon play, which Shakespeare, I feel sure, never read.

From this point onward I shall notice only the added portions. The Shakespeare parts are not only his, but his of his best style; so distinctively his that any one with ears as good as an ordinary schoolboy's will recognise them at once. In Act iv. Sc. 2 the soliloquy of Flavius, lines 29-50, is not Shakespeare's. It is in the rhythm of the second playwright, and is inseparably connected with Act iv. Sc. 3, 1. 463-543, which is certainly an added part. I am ashamed to say that I rejected most carelessly the whole of this scene in my original paper in 1868. My present opinion Mr. Tennyson has confirmed.

The next piece to be omitted is Act iv. Sc. 3, 1. 292—362, which is written in the same chopt-up prose as the Apemantusparts which we have omitted before; it also interferes with the sense. Timon says, "Gold sleeps here, and does no hired harm; here is the truest use for gold." Apemantus answers, "Thou art the cap of all the fools alive." But our cobbling playwright makes him answer, "Where liest o' nights, Timon?" and we are expected by the supporters of Mr. Knight's theory-or other similar theories to believe that in this, and the many other instances pointed out above, Shakespeare, working up an old play, has left all these gross and clumsy sutures unclosed! But above all, in this bit Apemantus tells Timon-"Yonder comes a poet and a painter." They talk for 60 lines, and then enter—Banditti ! more talk with Banditti 63 lines, and then enter-Steward! more talk (80 lines), and then at last enter "poet and painter!" To avoid this, modern editors make the curtain fall when the steward goes out; but this makes matters worse; the poet and painter must be then "coming yonder," not only while that interminable talk goes on, but while the curtain is down: imagine this to be Shakespeare's arrangement! But suppose the curtain does not fall? Then the poet and painter enter as the steward goes out and one of the first things they tell us is that "tis said he gave unto his steward a mighty sum." No, as the play stands, the curtain must fall in the

middle of a scene, and the poet and painter wait yonder all the while. This point alone settles the question of the present arrangement being Shakespeare's.

But cut out the prose parts in these scenes, or this scene rather, and all is right. Omit 1. 292—362; 1. 398–413; 1. 453-543; and Act v. Sc. 1, 1. 1-57. In this scene we also omit the talk with the steward, which is æsthetically contrary to the whole drift of the play. Had Timon been convinced that there was one "just and comfortable man," he would have ceased to be misanthropos, and would not have concluded his interview with

"Ne'er see thou man, and let me ne'er see thee."

In style also it agrees with our botcher.

"O you Gods!

Is yon'd despis'd and ruinous man my Lord?
Full of decay and fayling? Oh Monument
And wonder of good deeds euilly bestow'd !

What an alteration of Honor has desp'rate want made?"

This, and the like all through! Enough.

But I must warn the reader in comparing these passages with Shakespeare to take them as they stand in the Folio, before they have been poped and Theobalded and Walkered, into somewhat of a pseudo-Shakespearian form. The only other bit I would reject is, Act v. Sc. 3, where the Soldier who can't read, reads an Epitaph which is not written, and gives us the most useless and superfluous information of his own afterwards. Thus much then for the division I make of the play between the writers. the reader any comment of mine on the unity of the Shakespeare work so separated; it is printed by itself in The New Shakspere Society's Transactions: if he wants to feel the dislocated corduroy road one has to travel over in reading the other writer's work by itself, it is a slight task to mark his work in any edition of the play as generally printed, and read it separately.

I spare

But I have only done one part of my work. I have next to show how this curious treatment of a play of Shakespeare's came to be adopted. His share of the play was written undoubtedly about

1606. Delius places it with Pericles rightly.

The rhyme test places it there also. But I believe that Timon differs from other plays in not being finished in Shakespeare's lifetime at all, though I do not advance this as certain, but as probable only. The play is printed in the Folio next to Romeo and Juliet, and is paged 80, 81, 82, and then 81, 82 over again; then 83, &c., to 98; then follow a leaf unpaged, with the actors' names printed on one side, and Julius Cæsar. Now the play of Troylus and Cressida, which is not mentioned at all in the Index (Catalogue') of the Folio, is paged 79 and 80 in its 2nd and 3rd pages, and was evidently intended at first to follow in its proper place as the pendant or comparison play to Romeo and Juliet. But as this play was originally called "The History of Troylus and Cressida" (so in the Quarto Edition), and as there is really nothing tragical in the main bulk of it, it was doubted if it could be put with the Tragedies, so the editors of the Folio compromised the matter by putting it between the Histories and Tragedies, and not putting it at all in the Catalogue, though they still retained their first title for it as "The Tragedie of Troylus and Cressida." This space, then, of pp. 80-108, which would have just held the Troylus and Cressida, being left unfilled, it became necessary to fill it. But if, as I conjecture, some of the following plays from Julius Cæsar to Cymbeline were already in type, and had been printed off, there was nothing to fall back on but Pericles and the unfinished Timon. I have given reasons in my paper on Pericles for believing that the editors would not have considered it respectful to Shakespeare's memory to publish the Pericles; they therefore took the incomplete Timon, put it into a playwright's hands, and told him to make it up to 30 pages. Hence the enormous amount of padding and bombast in his part of the work: hence the printing of prose cut up into short lines as if it were verse, which is a very common characteristic of spurious or otherwise irregular editions: hence the Dumas style of dialogue so frequent in the Apemantus parts: hence the hurry that left uncorrected so many contradictions, and unfilled so many omissions. The hypothesis is bold even to impudence; but it accounts for the phenomena, and no other can I find that will.

Having, then, laid down as certain the division of the play, and the assignment of the nucleus to Shakespeare; and, as probable,