— 91—

servile to every humour, every caprice of taste; this alone would testify to the late composition of the drama. For these reasons, which coincide in a striking manner with the peculiar nature of the text, I believe that Timon of Athens is one of Shakespeare's last works, perhaps his very last production“.

Ulrici has also acceded to the opinion that a farewell to the theatre may be discovered in the Tempest:„M. Carrière (No. 2 of his explanations to W. v. Kaulbach's Shakespeare- galerie, Berlin 1857) in his ingenious description of Skake- speare's Seelenleben and Geistesgeschichte, establishes an hypothesis both profound and interesting(which Campbell had already incidentally brought forward), that the Tempest in Shakespeare's last dramatic work, and that he wrote the play, at all events, somewhat with the intention of offering it to his country as his farewell, a legacy of the mind and spirit in which he had conceived and poetically described life and history“.— But Ulrici judiciously places Henry VIII. later than the Tempest.

I indulge in these rather long quotations, in order to show that the idea we form of the poet's mind, of his in- creasing or decaying power of characterization, and predi- lection for certain characters at certain epochs of his life, is not without influence upon the order in which we arrange his plays, but that it will always remain an entirely subjec- tive criterion.