It were as good To pardon him that hath from nature stolen A man already made, as to remit Their saucy sweetness, that do coin heaven's image In stamps that are forbid: and the very difference of style is not wider than the gulf which gapes between the first style of Shakespeare and the last. But men of Shakespeare's stamp, I venture to think, do not thus repeat themselves. The echo of the passage in _A Midsummer Night's Dream_, describing the girlish friendship of Hermia and Helena, which we find in the first act of _The Two Noble Kinsmen_, describing the like girlish friendship of Emilia and Flavina, is an echo of another sort. Both, I need hardly say, are unquestionably Shakespeare's; but the fashion in which the matured poet retouches and completes the sketch of his earlier years--composes an oil painting, as it were, from the hints and suggestions of a water-colour sketch long since designed and long since half forgotten--is essentially different from the mere verbal and literal trick of repetition which sciolists might think to detect in the present instance. Again we must needs fall back on the inevitable and indefinable test of style; a test which could be of no avail if we were foolish enough to appeal to scholiasts and their attendant dunces, but which should be of some avail if we appeal to experts and their attentive scholars; and by this test we can but remark that neither the passage in _A Midsummer Night's Dream_ nor the corresponsive passage in _The Two Noble Kinsmen_ could have been written by any hand known to us but Shakespeare's; whereas the passage in _King Edward III_. might as certainly have been written by any one out of a dozen poets then living as the answering passage in _Measure for Measure_ could assuredly have been written by Shakespeare alone.