His art, then, was neither defective nor vitiated in any part of its own constitutive character, although certain works are obviously weak and certain parts of other works, in the vast mass that goes under his name. Such youthful plays as _Love's Labour's Lost, The Two Gentlemen,_ the _Comedy of Errors,_ are not notable, save for a certain ease and grace, only manifesting in certain places the trace of his profound spirit. The "historical plays," are as we have already shown, fragmentary and do not form complete poems animated with a single breath of passion. Some of them, and especially the first part of _Henry VI,_ have about them an arid quality and are loosely anecdotal; in others, such as _Henry IV_ and _Henry V,_ is evident the desire to stimulate patriotic feelings, and they are further burdened with scenes of a purely informative nature. _Coriolanus_ too, which was apparently composed later and is derived from a different source, also lacks complete internal justification, for it consists of a study of characters. _Timon_ (assuming that it was his) is developed in a mechanical manner, although it is full of social and ethical observations and possesses rhetorical fervour. _Cymbeline_ and the _Winter's Tale_ contain lovely scenes, but are not as a whole works of the first order; the idyllic and romantic Shakespeare appears in them to have rather declined in comparison to the author of the earlier plays of the same sort, inspired with a very different vigour. _Measure for Measure_ contains sentiments and personages that are profoundly Shakespearean, as the protagonist Angelo, the meter out of inexorable justice, so sure of his own virtue, who yields to the first sensual temptation that occurs, in Claudius, who wishes and does not wish to die, and in the Barnadine already mentioned. This play, which oscillates between the tragic and the comic, and has a happy ending, instead of forming a drama of the sarcastic-sorrowful-horrible sort, fails to persuade us that it should have been thus developed and thus ended. There is something of the composite in the structure of the wonderful _Merchant of Venice,_ and certain of the scenes of _Troilus and Cressida,_ such as those of the speeches of Ulysses and those on the other side of Hector and Troilus, seem to be echoes or even entire pieces taken from historical plays and transported with ironic intention into comedy. Points of this sort are to be found even in the great tragedies. In _Lear,_ for instance, the adventures of Gloucester and his son are not completely satisfactory, grafted as they are upon those of the king and his daughters, either because they introduce too realistic an element into a play with an imaginary theme, or because they create a heavy parallelism, much praised by an Italian critic, who has attempted to express _King Lear_ in a geometrical form; but the origin for this parallelism may perhaps be really due to the need