Page:A study of Shakespeare (IA cu31924013158393).pdf/158

 of Catiline and Sejanus.—I cannot but think, too, that Lamb's first hypothetical ascription of these wonderful scenes to Webster, so much the most Shakespearean in gait and port and accent of all Shakespeare's liege men-at-arms, was due to a far happier and more trustworthy instinct than led him in later years to liken them rather to "the overflowing griefs and talking distraction of Titus Andronicus."

We have wandered it may be somewhat out of the right time into a far other province of poetry than the golden land of Shakespeare's ripest harvest-fields of humour. And now, before we may enter the "flowery square" made by the summer growth of his four greatest works in pure and perfect comedy "beneath a broad and equal-blowing wind" of all happiest and most fragrant imagination, we have but one field to cross, one brook to ford, that hardly can be thought to keep us out of Paradise. In the garden-plot on whose wicket is inscribed All's Well that Ends Well, we are hardly distant from Eden itself

The ninth story of the third day of the Decameron is one of the few subjects chosen by