Page:A study of Shakespeare (IA cu31924013158393).pdf/157

 all judges capable of passing any sentence worthier of record than are

Fancies too weak for boys, too green and idle For girls of nine:

to the effect that those magnificent passages, well-nigh overcharged at every point with passion and subtlety, sincerity and instinct of pathetic truth, are no less like Shakespeare's work than unlike Jonson's: though hardly perhaps more unlike the typical manner of his adult and matured style than is the general tone of The Case is Altered, his one surviving comedy of that earlier period in which we know from Henslowe that the stout-hearted and long struggling young playwright went through so much theatrical hackwork and piecework in the same rough harness with other now more or less notable workmen then drudging under the manager's dull narrow sidelong eye for bare bread and bare shelter. But this unlikeness, great as it is and serious and singular, between his former and his latter style in high comedy, gives no warrant for us to believe him capable of so immeasurable a transformation in tragic style and so indescribable a decadence in tragic power as would be implied in a descent from the "fine madness" of "old Jeronymo" to the flat sanity and smoke-dried sobriety