Indeed, while reading the _Letter_, one can hardly resist the power of Prof. Spalding's argument, backt as it is by his well-chosen passages from the Play. But when one turns to the play itself, when one reads it aloud with a party of friends, then come doubt and hesitation. One begins to ask, 'Is this indeed Shakspere, Shakspere at the end of his glorious career, Shakspere who has just given us Perdita, Hermione and Autolycus'? Full of the heavenly beauty of Perdita's flowers, one reads over _The Two Noble Kinsmen_ flower-song, and asks, pretty as the fancy of a few of the epithets is, whether all that Shakspere, with the spring-flowers of Stratford about him, and the love of nature deeper than ever in his soul--whether all he has to say of the daisy--Chaucer's 'Quene of flourës alle'--is, that it is "smelless but most quaint"; and of marigolds, that they blow on death-beds[v:1], when one recollects his twenty-years' earlier use of them in _Lucrece_ (A.D. 1594):-- Without the bed her other fair hand was, On the green coverlet; whose perfect white Show'd like an April _daisy_ on the grass, With pearly sweat, resembling dew of night. Her eyes, like _marigolds_, had sheath'd their light, And canopied in darkness sweetly lay, Till they might open to adorn the day. Full of the ineffable charm and consistency of Miranda and Perdita, one asks of Emilia--Chaucer's daring huntress, virgin free, seeking no marriage-bed--whether Shakspere, at the crisis of her life, degraded her to a silly lady's-maid or shop-girl, not knowing her own mind, up and down like a bucket in a well, balancing her lovers' qualities against one another, saying she'd worn the losing Palamon's portrait on her right side, not the heart one, her left, &c.; and then (oh dear!) that Palamon might wound Arcite and _spoil his figure_! What a pity it would be! Arcite may win me, And yet may Palamon wound Arcite to The spoyling of his figure. O what pitty Enough for such a chance! V. iii. 68-71, p. 81, ed. Littledale. I say, is it possible to believe that Shakspere turnd a noble lady, a frank gallant nature, whose character he had rightly seizd at first, into a goose of this kind, whom one would like to shake, or box her ears well? The thing is surely impossible. Again, is it likely--and again, I say, at the end of his career, with all his experience behind him, that Shakspere would make his hero Palamon publicly urge on Venus in his prayer to her, that she was bound to protect him because he'd believd a wanton young wife's word that her old incapable husband was the father of her child? Is this the kind of thing that the Shakspere of Imogen, of Desdemona, of Queen Catherine, would put forward as the crown of his life and work? Again I say, it can hardly be.