"Not an angel of the air,
Bird melodious, or bird fair,
Be absent hence."
—were written by Shakespeare and not by Fletcher. Nor is it any detraction from Fletcher to take this view. Shakespeare himself has left songs hardly finer than Fletcher wrote at his best—hardly finer, for instance, than that magnificent pair from Valentinian. Only the note of Shakespeare happens to be different from the note of Fletcher: and it is Shakespeare's note—the note of
"The cowslips tall her pensioners be"
(also omitted by the inscrutable Dyce) and of
"When daisies pied, and violets blue,
And lady-smocks all silver-white,
And cuckoo buds of yellow hue
Do paint the meadows with delight ..."
—that we hear repeated in this Bridal Song.[A] And if this be so, it is but another proof for us that Dyce was not a critic for all time.
Nor is the accent of finality conspicuous in such passages as this from the Memoir:—
"Wright had heard that Shakespeare 'was a much better poet than player'; and Rowe tells us that soon after his admission into the company, he became distinguished, 'if not as an extraordinary actor, yet as an excellent writer.' Perhaps his execution did not equal his conception of a character, but we may rest assured that he who wrote the incomparable instructions to the player in Hamlet would never offend his audience by an injudicious performance."
I have no more to urge against writing of this order than that it has passed out of fashion, and that something different might reasonably have been looked for in a volume that bears the date 1894 on its title-page. The public owes Messrs. Bell & Sons a heavy debt; but at the same time the public has a peculiar interest in such a series as that of The Aldine Poets. A purchaser who finds several of these books to his mind, and is thereby induced to embark upon the purchase of the entire series, must feel a natural resentment if succeeding volumes drop below the implied standard. He cannot go back: and to omit the offending volumes is to spoil his set. And I contend that the action taken by Messrs. Bell & Sons in improving several of their more or less obsolete editions will only be entirely praiseworthy if we may take it as an earnest of their desire to place the whole series on a level with contemporary knowledge and criticism.