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of right to Helena's wooing... No less than by himself, we become acquainted with Bertram's character also by the reflection which his friend and tutor Parolles throws upon it: Tell me with whom you associate, and I tell you who you are. This part of Parolles too often is pointed to in the play, as to leave a doubt about his internal connection with the action. Parolles, moreover, answers to a wish of symmetry; he is placed to the side of Bertram, as the Coun- tess is to Helena's side. That Shakespeare, besides this task of Parolles, has used him as a comical figure, only proves the greatness of his art“.

The opinion which a Shakespeare scholar, from the subjects and characters chosen, and the manner in which the latter are delineated, has formed of the poet's state of mind at the end of his career, may be a reason of ascribing a play to an earlier or later period. If the great drama- tist, after having measured the depths of human passion, after a period of mighty emotion, of gloom, and temporary despondency, and even disgust passed on to the heights, from where he looked down with philosophical calm on this sea of troubles, in which great crimes are redeemed by self-sacrificing love, he may picture abnegation and recon- ciliation in his last creations, and may look with serene, perhaps somewhat melancholy benignity on lovely childhood, unconscious of the weary paths of life. He who reads in this way the growth of Shakespeare's mind out of his cha- racters, may place Timon after the great tragedies: Othello, Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, but before the Romances: Pericles, Cymbeline, Tempest, Winters'’s Tale, For the„lyrical writers usually utter themselves nearly at the moment they are smitten with the sharp stroke of joy, or of pain. Dramatic writers, for the purity and fidelity of whose work a certain aloofness from their individuality is needed, utter themselves more often not on the moment, but after an interval, during which self-possession and self-mastery have been attained“. He may be persuaded that the bitter feeling was giving way, and that the poet set himself