Apemantus is currish, because others are not. He has wit without charity. Alcibiades makes war on his city because others have not the rough-and-ready large practical justice of men used to knocks. He has a large good humour without idealism. Timon, the great-natured, truly generous man, whose mind is as beneficial as the sun, cannot be currish, nor stoop to the baseness of revenge. Finding men base, he removes himself from them, and ministers with bitter contempt to the baseness that infects them. The flaming out of his anger against whatever is parasitic in life makes the action of the last two acts. The exhibition of the baseness of parasites and of the wrath of a noble mind embittered, is contrived, varied and heightened with intense dramatic energy. The character of Flavius, Timon's steward, his only friend, shows again, as in so many of the plays, Shakespeare's deep sense of the noble generosity in faithful service. Some think the play gloomy, others that it is autobiography. Shakespeare's completed work is never gloomy. A great mind working with such a glory of energy cannot be gloomy. This generation is gloomy and unimaginative in its conception of art. Shakespeare, reading the story of Timon, saw in him an image of tragic destiny that would flood the heart of even an ingrate with pity. Great poets have something more difficult and more noble to do than to pin their hearts on their sleeves for daws to peck at. Shakespeare wrought the figure of Timon with as grave justice as he wrought Alcibiades. He wrought both from something feeling within himself, as he wrought Cleopatra, and Macbeth, and Sir Toby Belch. They are as much autobiographical, and as little, as the hundred other passionate moods that built up the system of his soul. The poetry of the play is that of the great late manner-- "will these moss'd trees, That have outlived the eagle, page thy heels, And skip when thou point'st out?" "Come not to me again: but say to Athens, Timon hath made his everlasting mansion Upon the beached verge of the salt flood: Who, once a day with his embossed froth The turbulent surge shall cover." The final speech, spoken by Alcibiades after he has read the epitaph, with which Timon goes down to death, like some hurt thing shrinking even from the thought of passers, is one of the most lovely examples of the power and variety of blank verse as a form of dramatic speech. _Alcib._ (reading) _Pass by and curse thy fill; but pass, and stay not here thy gait._