in The Fox and to that of Face in The Alchemist could not possibly escape the notice of the most cursory reader. The principle of disguise was the same in each case, whether the end in view were simply personal profit, or (as in the case of Hamlet) personal profit combined with revenge; and whether the disguise assumed was that of madness, of sickness, or of a foreign personality, the assumption of character was in all three cases identical. As to style, he was only too anxious to meet (and, he doubted not, to beat) on his own ground any antagonist whose ear had begotten[1] the crude and untenable theory that the Hamlet soliloquies were not distinctly within the range of the man who could produce those of Crites and of Macilente in Cynthia's Revels and Every Man out of his Humour. The author of those soliloquies could, and did, in the parallel passages of Hamlet, rise near the height of the master he honoured and loved.
The further discussion of this subject was reserved for the next meeting of the Society, as was also the reading of Mr. H.'s paper on the subsequent quarrel between the two joint authors of Hamlet, which led to Jonson's caricature of Shakespeare (then retired from London society to a country life of solitude) under the
- ↑ When the learned member made use of this remarkable phrase he probably had in his mind the suggestive query of Agnes, si les enfants qu'on fait se faisaient pas l'oreille? But the flower of rhetoric here gathered was beyond the reach of Arnolphe's innocent ward. The procreation in such a case is even more difficult for fancy to realise than the conception.
