We have a record in Francis Meres's "Palladis Tamia" of a play by Shakespeare called "Love's Labor's Won"; and there is no reasonable doubt that that was the first name of "All's Well that Ends Well." As the "Palladis Tamia" was published in 1598, this play was produced before that year, and all the evidence, internal and external, goes to show that Shakespeare wrote it soon after "Love's Labor's Lost," and as a counterpart to that comedy. The difference of its style in various parts had been remarked upon in general terms; but I believe that this difference was first specially indicated in the following passage, which I cannot do better here than to quote from the introduction to my edition of the play published in 1857; and I do so with the greater freedom because the particular traits which it discriminated have been lately, in the present year, insisted upon by the Rev. Mr. Fleay, in his very useful and suggestive, but not altogether to be trusted "Shakespeare Manual," to which I have before referred. "It is to be observed that passages of rhymed couplets, in which the thought is somewhat constrained and its expression limited by the form of the verse, are scattered freely through the play, and that these are found side by side with passages of blank verse in which the thought, on the contrary, so entirely dominates the form, and overloads and weighs it down, as to produce the impression that the poet, in writing them, was almost regardless of the graces of his art, and merely sought an expression of his ideas in the most compressed and elliptical form. The former trait is characteristic of his youthful style; the latter marks a certain period of his maturer years. Contracted words, which Shakespeare used more freely in his later than in his earlier works, abound; and in some passages words are used in an esoteric sense, which is distinctive of the poet's style about the time when 'Measure for Measure' was produced. Note, for instance, the use of 'succeed' in 'owe and succeed thy weakness,' in Act II., Sc. 4 of that play, and in 'succeed thy father in manners,' Act I., Sc. 1 of this. It is to be observed also that the advice given by the Countess to Bertram when he leaves Rousillon is so like that of Polonius to Laertes in a similar situation, that either the latter is an expansion of the former, or the former a reminiscence of the latter; and as the passage is written in the later style, the second supposition appears the more probable. Finally, it is worthy of remark that both the French officers who figure in this play as First Lord and Second Lord are somewhat strangely named _Dumain_, and that in 'Love's Labor's Lost' Dumain is also the name of that one of the three attendants and brothers in love of the King who has a post in the army; which, when taken in connection with other circumstances, is at least a hint of some relation between the two plays."