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father and master of our narrative poetry. Among all competent scholars and all rational students of Shakespeare there can have been, except possibly with regard to three of the shorter scenes, no room for doubt or perplexity on any detail of the subject since the perfect summary and the masterly decision of Mr. Dyce. These three scenes, as no such reader will need to be told or reminded, are the two first soliloquies of the Gaoler's Daughter after the release of Palamon, and the scene of the portraits, as we may in a double sense call it, in which Emilia, after weighing against each other in solitude the likenesses of the cousins, receives from her own kinsfolk a full and laboured description of their leading champions on either side. Even setting apart for once and for a moment the sovereign evidence of mere style, we must recognise in this last instance a beautiful and significant example of that loyal and loving fidelity to the minor passing suggestions of Chaucer's text which on all possible occasions of such comparison so markedly and vividly distinguishes the work of Shakespeare's from the work of Fletcher's hand. Of the pestilent abuse and perversion to which Fletcher has put the perhaps already superfluous hints or sketches by Shakespeare for an episodical underplot, in his trans-