steal from spring if October had leave to go a Maying in some Olympian
masquerade of melody and sunlight. And it is not easier, easy as it is,
to discern and to define the three main stages of Shakespeare's work and
progress, than to classify under their several heads the representative
plays belonging to each period by the law of their nature, if not by the
accident of their date. There are certain dominant qualities which do on
the whole distinguish not only the later from the earlier plays, but the
second period from the first, the third period from the second; and it is
with these qualities alone that the higher criticism, be it aesthetic or
scientific, has properly anything to do.

A new method of solution has been applied to various difficulties which
have been discovered or invented in the text by the care or the
perversity of recent commentators, whose principle of explanation is
easier to abuse than to use with any likelihood of profit. It is at
least simple enough for the simplest of critics to apply or misapply:
whenever they see or suspect an inequality or an incongruity which may be
wholly imperceptible to eyes uninured to the use of their spectacles,
they assume at once the presence of another workman, the intrusion of a
stranger's hand. This supposition of a double authorship is naturally as
impossible to refute as to establish by other than internal evidence and
appeal to the private judgment or perception of the reader. But it is no
better than the last resource of an empiric, the last refuge of a
sciolist; a refuge which the soundest of scholars will be slowest to
seek, a resource which the most competent of critics will be least ready
to adopt. Once admitted as a principle of general application, there are
no lengths to which it may not carry, there are none to which it has not
carried, the audacious fatuity and the arrogant incompetence of tamperers
with the authentic text. Recent editors who have taken on themselves the
high office of guiding English youth in its first study of Shakespeare