Be absent hence."

--were written by Shakespeare and not by Fletcher. Nor is it any
detraction from Fletcher to take this view. Shakespeare himself has
left songs hardly finer than Fletcher wrote at his best--hardly finer,
for instance, than that magnificent pair from _Valentinian_. Only the
note of Shakespeare happens to be different from the note of
Fletcher: and it is Shakespeare's note--the note of

"The cowslips tall her pensioners be"

(also omitted by the inscrutable Dyce) and of

"When daisies pied, and violets blue,
And lady-smocks all silver-white,
And cuckoo buds of yellow hue
Do paint the meadows with delight ..."

--that we hear repeated in this Bridal Song.[A] And if this be so, it
is but another proof for us that Dyce was not a critic for all time.

Nor is the accent of finality conspicuous in such passages as this
from the Memoir:--

"Wright had heard that Shakespeare 'was a much better poet than
player'; and Rowe tells us that soon after his admission into the
company, he became distinguished, 'if not as an extraordinary
actor, yet as an excellent writer.' Perhaps his execution did not
equal his conception of a character, but we may rest assured that
he who wrote the incomparable instructions to the player in