divinities of ancient faith reposed; he looked through a glimmering and uncertain light, and caught only glimpses of the sanctity of that world of wonders: and it was with an imagination heated by the flame of mystery and partial ignorance that he turned away from the scene so imperfectly revealed, to brood on the beauty of its broken contours, and allow fancy to create magnificence richer than memory ever saw. The occurrence of classical allusions here, therefore, affords no reason for doubting his authorship even of those passages in which they are found: and if we could trace any of his singularities in the images which we have, the argument in his favour would be strengthened by these. Most of the allusions are too slightly sketched to permit this; but one or two are like him in their unfaithfulness. We have "Mars' drum" in the 'Venus and Adonis'; and here beauty is described as able to make him spurn it: the altar of the same deity is alluded to as the scene of a Grecian marriage. The "Nemean lion's hide" is here, as his nerve in 'Hamlet.' [Sidenote: specially in Arcite's prayer in Act V. scene i.] But the most characteristic use of this sort of imagery is in the prayer in the first scene of the Fifth Act. [Sidenote: This scene is certainly Shakspere's.] The whole tenor of the language, the solemnity and majesty of the tone of thought, the piling up of the heap of metaphors and images, and the boldness and admirable originality of their conception, all these are Shakspeare's; and the fact of this accumulation of feeling, thought, and imagination, being employed to create, out of a fragmentary classical outline, a picture both new in its features and gorgeously magnificent in its filling up, is strongly indicative of his hand, and strikingly resembles his mode of dealing with such subjects elsewhere. [Sidenote: Shakspere's tendency to reflection.]