soul rapt almost beyond the power of writing. But the blots and erasures
were not made by a "fine frenzy"; _they_ speak no less eloquently for an
artistic taste and skill excited and alert, and able to guide the frenzy
and give it a contagious power through the forms of verse,--this
taste and this skill and control being the very elements by which his
expressions become an echo of the poet's soul,--pleasing, or, in the
uncultivated, helping to form, a like taste in the hearer, and exciting
a like imagined condition of feeling and poetic vision.

Yet if it were made a question, to be decided from internal evidence,
whether the scene here analyzed was written before or after the rest of
the piece, a strong argument for its being written before might be found
in the peculiar impression it leaves upon the fancy. Let us suppose we
follow the author while he runs it over, which he does quite rapidly,
since there are no blotted lines, but only here and there a comma to
be inserted. He designed to open his tragedy. He finds he has set a
scene,--in his mind's eye the entrance-hall to an Athenian house, which
he thinks he has presently intimated plainly enough to be Timon's house.
Here he has brought forward four actors and made them speak as just
meeting; they come by twos from different ways, and the first two
immediately make it known that the other two are a merchant and
jeweller, and almost immediately that they themselves are, one a
painter, the other a poet. They have all brought gifts or goods for
the lord Timon. The Athenian Senators pass over, and, as becomes
their dignity, are at once received in an inner hall,--the first four
remaining on the stage. All is so far clear. He has also, by the
dialogue of the Painter and Poet, made in itself taking to the attention
through the picture and the flighty recitation, suggested and interested
us incidentally in the character of Timon, and conveyed a vague
misgiving of misfortune to come to him. And there is withal a swelling