Now here we have a play founded on a poem, the original delicate and noble, where the other is coarse and trivial; and we ask, 'Was this Shakspere's way of treating his originals?' In his earlier years he based his _Romeo and Juliet_ on Brooke's poem of the same name--a fine work, and little disfigured by the coarseness of the time. Yet he pruned it of all really offensive matter, and has given us a perfect love-story, as ardent as it is pure. His skill in omission is remarkably shown in one respect. In Brooke's poem, Juliet, reflecting when alone on Romeo's sudden love, remembers that he is an enemy to her house, and suspects that he may intend dishonourable love as a base means of wreaking vengeance on hereditary foes. It seems to me that a thought so cunning is out of character with Juliet--certainly would have been felt as a stain on Shakspere's Juliet. That Shakspere deliberately omitted this, is known by one slight reference. Juliet says to Romeo, 'If thy intent of love be honourable, Thy purpose marriage.' That is all--no cunning caution, no base doubt. Now if in this original, and in this play, we trace the very manner of Shakspere's working--taking up gold mixed with dross, and purifying it in the furnace of his genius--are we to suppose that later in life, with taste more fastidious, even if his imagination were less strong, he carried out a converse process; that he took Chaucer's gold, and mixed it with alloy? That, I greatly doubt. Also, would he imitate himself so closely as he is imitated in certain scenes of the _Two N. K._? Another point. Love between persons of very different rank has been held by many dramatists to be a fine subject for the stage. Shakspere never introduces it. _Ophelia_ loves a Prince, and _Violet_ a duke, and Rosalind a Squire's son; but gentlehood unites all. Helena in _All's Well_ is a gentlewoman. With anything like levelling aspirations Shakspere had clearly no sympathy. In no undoubted play of his have we, so far as I remember, any attempt to make the love of the lowly born for the high a subject of sympathy: there is no Beggar maid to any of his King Cophetuas. Goneril and Regan stoop to Edmund through baseness; Malvolio's love for Olivia is made ridiculous. The Gaoler's Daughter of the _Two N. K._ stands alone: like the waiting-maid in the _Critic_, she goes mad in white linen, and as painfully recalls Ophelia, as our cousins the monkeys remind us of men.