As artists advance in life, they develop, by growing familiar with the conditions of their art, the power of concealing its limitations,--a faculty in which even the greatest artists are often deficient in their early years. There is an anecdote of Schumann which somewhat crudely illustrates this. It is said that in one of his early symphonies he introduced a passage leading up to a climax, at which the horns were to take up the aria in triumph. At the rehearsal, when the moment came for the horns to trumpet forth their message of victory, there was heard a sort of smothered braying which made everybody laugh. The composer had arranged his climax so that it fell upon a note which the horns could not sound except with closed stops. The passage had to be rewritten. The young painter is frequently found struggling with subjects, with effects of light, which are almost impossible to render, and which perhaps an older man would not attempt. It is not surprising to find among the early works of Shakespeare that some of the characters, however true to life,--nay, because true to life,--are almost impossible to be represented on the stage. Certainly Romeo presents us with a character of the kind. Shakespeare's knowledge of human nature seems to have antedated his knowledge of the stage. In imagining the character of Romeo, a character to fit the plot of the old story, he took little thought for his actors. In conjuring up the probabilities which would lead a man into such a course of conduct as Romeo's, Shakespeare had in his mind the probabilities and facts in real life rather than the probabilities demanded by the stage. Romeo must be a man almost wholly made up of emotion, a creature very young, a lyric poet in the intensity of his sensations, a child in his helplessness beneath the ever-varying currents and whirlpools of his feeling. He lives in a walking and frenzied dream, comes in contact with real life only to injure himself and others, and finally drives with the collected energy of his being into voluntary shipwreck upon the rocks of the world. This man must fall in love at first sight. He must marry clandestinely. He must be banished for having taken part in a street fight, and must return to slay himself upon the tomb of his beloved.