a moment—namely, that such ears are commoner than I would fain believe on heads externally or ostensibly human,—has been raised with regard to the first immortal song of Mariana in the moated grange. This question is whether the second verse appended by Fletcher to that divine Shakespearean fragment may not haply have been written by the author of the first. The visible and audible evidence that it cannot is of a kind which must at once leap into sight of all human eyes and conviction of all human ears. The metre of Shakespeare's verse, as written by Shakespeare, is not the metre of Fletcher's. It can only seem the same to those who hear by finger and not by ear: a class now at all events but too evidently numerous enough to refute Sir Hugh's antiquated objection to the once apparently tautologous phrase of Pistol.[1]
- ↑ I add the proof in a footnote, so as to take up no more than a small necessary space of my text with the establishment of a fact which yet can seem insignificant to no mortal who has a human ear for lyric song. Shakespeare's verse, as all the wide world knows, ends thus:
The echo has been dropped by Fletcher, who has thus achieved the remarkable musical feat of turning a nightingale's note into a sparrow's. The mutilation of Philomela by the hands of Tereus was a
