! CHARACTERISTICS OF THE PLAY, PROBABLE DATE OF COMPOSITION, EARES, in his list of the dramatic productions by which Shakespeare had, before the year 1598, established the general reputation of being "the most excellent among the English in both tragedy and comedy," places the Two GENTLEMEN OF VERONA the first in order of thirteen dramas which he names. If we add to this list, PERICLES, and the two parts of HENRY VI., which Meares does not mention, though both were prior to his date, Shakespeare had, before his thirty-fourth year, been the acknowledged author of seventeen dramas; and if the Two GENTLEMEN OF VERONA were the first of these, it must certainly have been the production of his early youth. His poem of VENUS AND ADONIS, first printed in 1592, he himself has (in his dedication) designated as "the first heir of his invention," and may probably have been written before he removed to London,-and before, or not long after, his twentieth year. The Two GENTLEMEN OF VERONA, if not his earliest comedy, was in all probability written in the same, or at least the next, stage of his intellectual progress. Hanmer, and after him, Upton, thought its style so little resembling his general dramatic manner, that they pronounced with great confidence, that "he could have had no other hand in it than enlivening, with some speeches and lines, thrown in here and there," the production of some inferior dramatist, from whose thoughts his own are easily to be distinguished, "as being of a different stamp from the rest." There seems no reasonable ground for such an opinion; which has, indeed, been fully refuted by Johnson, and rejected by all succeeding critics. On the contrary, the play is full of undeniable marks of the author, in its strong resemblance in taste and style to his earlier plays and poems, as well as in the indications it gives of the author's future power of original humour and vivid delineation of character. It, indeed, has the characteristics of a young author who had already acquired a ready and familiar mastery of poetic diction and varied versification, and who had studied nature with a poet's eye; for the play abounds in brief passages of great beauty and melody. There are here, too, as in his other early dramas, outlines of thought and touches of character, sometimes faintly or imperfectly sketched, to which he afterwards returned in his maturer years, and wrought them out into his most striking scenes and impressive passages. Thus, Julia and Silvia are, both of them, evidently early studies of female love and loveliness, from the unpractised "'prentice hand" of the same great artist, who was afterwards to pourtray with matchless delicacy and truth the deeper affections, the nobler intellects, and the varied imaginative genius of Viola, of Rosalind, and of Imogen. Indeed, as a drama of character, however inferior to his own after-creations, it is, when compared with the works of his predecessors and contemporaries, superior alike in taste and in originality; for (as Mr. Hallam justly observes) "it was, probably, the first English comedy in which characters are drawn ideal and yet true:" although, when contrasted with the vivid and discriminating delineations to which his genius afterwards familiarized his audience, both the truth of nature and the ideal grace appear marked with the faint colouring and uncertain drawing of a timid hand. The composition, as a whole, does not seem to have been poured forth with the rapid abundance of his later works; but, in its graver parts, bears evidence of the young author's careful elaboration, seldom daring to deviate from the habits of versification to which his muse had been accustomed, and fearful of venturing on any untried novelty of expression. Johnson (probably on the authority of his friend, Sir J. Reynolds) has well replied to the objection raised by Upton to Shakespeare's right of authorship to this piece, founded on the difference of style and manner from his other plays, by comparing this difference to the variation of manner between Raphael's first pictures and those of his ripened talent. This comparison is more apt and pregnant than Johnson's limited acquaintance with the arts of design allowed him to perceive. Raphael, as compared with other great masters of his art, was eminently the dramatic painter,-the delineator of human action, passion, character, and expression; and, as the peculiar powers |