add but little discredit to the memory of a man already disgraced as the
defamer of Eleanor of Castile; while it would be a relief to feel assured
that there was but one English poet of any genius who could be capable of
either villainy.

In this play, then, more decisively than in _Titus Andronicus_, we find
Shakespeare at work (so to speak) with both hands--with his left hand of
rhyme, and his right hand of blank verse. The left is loth to forego the
practice of its peculiar music; yet, as the action of the right grows
freer and its touch grows stronger, it becomes more and more certain that
the other must cease playing, under pain of producing mere discord and
disturbance in the scheme of tragic harmony. We imagine that the writer
must himself have felt the scene of the roses to be pitched in a truer
key than the noble scene of parting between the old hero and his son on
the verge of desperate battle and certain death. This is the last and
loftiest farewell note of rhyming tragedy; still, in _King Richard II_,
and in _Romeo and Juliet_, it struggles for awhile to keep its footing,
but now more visibly in vain. The rhymed scenes in these plays are too
plainly the survivals of a ruder and feebler stage of work; they cannot
hold their own in the new order with even such discordant effect of
incongruous excellence and inharmonious beauty as belongs to the death-
scene of the Talbots when matched against the quarrelling scene of
Somerset and York. Yet the briefest glance over the plays of the first
epoch in the work of Shakespeare will suffice to show how protracted was
the struggle and how gradual the defeat of rhyme. Setting aside the
retouched plays, we find on the list one tragedy, two histories, and four
if not five comedies, which the least critical reader would attribute to
this first epoch of work. In three of these comedies rhyme can hardly be
said to be beaten; that is, the rhyming scenes are on the whole equal to
the unrhymed in power and beauty. In the single tragedy, and in one of