a very few times. Few people read "Timon of Athens"; and I do not
blame the neglect, for it is a spirit-crushing play, and a man must be
bold if he cares to look at it twice. But in it it is plain to me that
Shakspere lets us see a gleam from the boiling flood of scorn that
raged far under his serene exterior. The words bite; the abandonment
of the satirist is complete. He puts into the mouth of the man who is
down a whole acrid and scurrilous philosophy of success and failure;
and there is not a passage in Swift which can equal for venom and
emphasis the ferocious words of the Athenian misanthrope. We know
nothing of Shakspere's mood while he was writing this cruel piece, but
I should imagine he must have been ready to quit the world in a
veritable ecstasy of wild passion and contempt.

If we take away the literature of love and the literature of fear, we
have but little left save the endless works that harp on one
theme--the remorseless savagery of civilised men toward those who
fail, or are supposed to fail, in life's grim warfare.

"Freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky,
That dost not bite so nigh
As benefits forgot!
Though thou the waters warp,
Thy tooth is not so sharp
As friend remembered not!"

Those lines are hackneyed until every poetaster can quote them or
parody them at will; but very few readers consider that the bitter
verse summarises a whole literature. From Homer to Tennyson the ugly
tune has been played on all strings; and mankind have such a vivid
perception of the truth uttered by the satirists, that they read the