"It is remarkable that many of our ancient writers were ambitious to exhibit Sidney's worthies on the stage, and, when his subordinate heroes were advanced to such honor, how happened it that Pyrocles, their leader, should be overlooked? Musidorus his companion, Argalus and Parthenia, Phalantus and Eudora, Andromana, etc., furnished titles for different tragedies; and perhaps Pyrocles, in the present instance, was defrauded of a like distinction. The names invented or employed by Sidney had once such popularity that they were sometimes borrowed by poets who did not profess to follow the direct current of his fables, or attend to the strict preservation of his charac

All circumstances therefore considered, it is not improbable that Shakespeare designed his chief character to be called Pyrocles, not Pericles, however ignorance or accident might have shuffled the latter into the place of the former. This conjecture will amount almost to certainty, if we diligently compare Pericles with the Pyrocles of the Arcadia. The same romantic, versatile, and sensitive disposition is ascribed to both characters, and several of the incidents pertaining to the latter are found mingled with the adventures of the former personage; while, throughout the play, the obligations of its author to various other parts of the romance may be frequently and distinctly traced, not only in the assumption of an image or a sentiment, but in the adoption of the very words of his once popular predecessor; proving incontestably the Poet's familiarity with the Arcadia to have been very considerable."

To which we have but to add, that the names Pyrocles and Pericles are so nearly the same in sound, that the slight change may be well enough accounted for by supposing the Poet's acquaintance with the Arcadia to have been made by the ear, not by the eye; and that the resemblances between the play and the romance are such as would naturally result from a vivid recollection of the contents of the latter, rather than from a present study of them or reference to them. Allowing, then, the play to have been originally written as early at least as 1590, and some parts of it re

written in 1608, this will sufficiently account for the great diversity of style, without supposing more than one hand in the composition, and at the same time account for its being regarded as a new play at the latter date.

But we have not yet fully given the external evidence for assigning Pericles to Shakespeare. We lay no stress, here, on the appearance of his name in the title-page of the first edition; as several other plays were in like manner fathered upon him, such as The Life of Sir John Oldcastle and The London Prodigal, which it is all but certain he had no hand in writing. In the case of Pericles, however, there seems to have been a constant and unquestioned tradition, inferring that it was rightly published as his. In The Times Displayed, a poem published in 1646, and dedicated by S. Shepherd to the Earl of Pembroke, occurs the following:

"See him whose tragic scenes Euripides

Doth equal, and with Sophocles we may
Compare great Shakespeare: Aristophanes
Never like him his fancy could display:
Witness The Prince of Tyre, his Pericles."

And six years later, J. Tatham, in some lines prefixed to
Richard Brome's Jovial Crew, compliments himself at
Shakespeare's expense, thus:

"But Shakespeare, the plebeian driller, was

Founder'd in his Pericles, and must not pass."

All which, together with the lines before quoted from Dryden, the title-pages of the five quarto issues, and the including of it in the folio of 1664, is external evidence amply sufficient to offset the non-appearance of the play in the folio of 1623; while the still stronger evidence furnished by the play itself quite precludes any doubt being made as to the authorship from that circumstance. Still the question arises, why Pericles alone of Shakespeare's plays should not have been included in that collection. This, we apprehend may be sufficiently accounted for in that the copyright was already vested in another party,

while the great and long-continued popularity of the play made it for his interest to retain the exclusive control of it. However, on this point, we may as well give the statement of Mr. Collier; which we the rather do, that it differs in some respects from our own judgment as already expressed.

"An opinion," says he, "has long prevailed, and we have no doubt it is well founded, that two hands are to be traced in the composition of Pericles. The larger part of the first three acts were in all probability the work of an inferior dramatist: to these Shakespeare added comparatively little; but he found it necessary, as the story advanced and the interest increased, to insert more of his own composition. His hand begins to be distinctly seen in the third act, and afterwards we feel persuaded that we could extract nearly every line that was not dictated by his great intellect. We apprehend that Shakespeare found a drama on the story in possession of one of the companies performing in London, and that, in accordance with the ordinary practice of the time, he made additions to and improvements in it, and procured it to be represented at the Globe heater. Who might be the author of the original piece, it would be vain to conjecture. Although we have no decisive proof that Shakespeare ever worked in immediate concert with any of his contemporaries, it was the custom with nearly all the dramatists of his day, and it is not impossible that such was the case with Pericles.

"The circumstance that it was a joint production may partly account for the non-appcarance o. Pericles in the folio of 1623. Ben Jonson, when printing the volume of his works, in 1616, excluded for this reason The Case is Altered, and Eastward Ho! in the composition of which he had been engaged with others; and when the player-editors of the folio of 1623 were collecting their materials, they perhaps omitted Pericles because some living author might have an interest in it. Of course we only advance this

point as a mere speculation; and the fact that the publishers of the folio of 1623 could not purchase the right of the bookseller, who had then the property in Pericles, may have been the real cause of its non-insertion."

The story on which Pericles is founded is very ancient, and is met with in a great variety of forms. It occurs in that old store-house of popular fiction the Gesta Romanorum, and its antiquity is shown by the existence of an Anglo-Saxon version which was printed not many years since under the care of Mr. Thorpe. It is said that Latin manuscripts of it are in existence, dating as far back as the tenth century. The story was accessible to Shakespeare in at least two forms. One of these was a prose translation from the Gesta Romanorum by Lawrence Twine, first printed in 1576, and republished in 1607, with the following title: The Pattern of Painful Adventures: Containing the most excellent, pleasant, and variable History of the strange accidents that befel unto Prince Apollonius, the Lady Lucina his wife, and Tharsia his daughter. The other of these forms was the version of old John Gower, who rendered it into English verse, and made it a part of his Confessio Amantis, with the title Appollinus, the Prince of Tyre. Gower, it scarce need be said, lived at the same time with Chaucer, and well deserves to be remembered and studied as one of the masters of English poetry in that age. His Confessio Amantis was first printed by Caxton in 1483. In Shakespeare's day it was very popular; but in later times the author has been well-nigh lost sight of in the outshining brightness of his great contemporary. In the story of Prince Appollinus, Gower avowedly took his incidents from a metrical version in the Pantheon, or Universal Chronicle of Godfrey of Viterbo, which was made in the latter part of the twelfth century. The fact of the story being so well-known and so popular in Gower's poem was of course the reason why he was made to serve as Chorus in the play. Mr. Collier seems to think that the incidents of Pericles were rather

borrowed from Twine's version of the story than from Gower's. That this could not have been the case is evident from the fact, that wherever the names of the persons vary in the two versions the play follows Gower: moreover, there are a few expressions in the play which must have been taken directly from the poem. Beyond this, the play indicates no borrowing from either source except the naked story; nor even here does it follow Twine's version in any point where this varies from Gower's.

There is one more old performance to be briefly noticed in this connection. This is the novel mentioned above, which was originally published with a title-page reading thus: The Painful Adventures of Pericles Prince of Tyre. Being the true History of the Play of Pericles, as it was lately presented by the worthy and ancient Poet John Gower. At London: Printed by T. P. for Nat. Butter. 1608. The novel was evidently made up partly from Twine's version of the story, and partly from notes taken of the play as performed on the stage. The great popularity of the drama, and the impossibility of getting any copy of it for the press, most likely induced Nathaniel Butter to employ some person at the theater for that purpose. The novel is of considerable value in helping to clear up some points in the text of the play. And the greater length and completeness of some of the speeches, as there given, strongly favors the belief, which is otherwise very probable, that the drama has reached us in a mutilated and imperfect state. For our knowledge of this novel we are indebted to a tract printed in 1839, and entitled Farther Particulars regarding Shakespeare and his Works.

Respecting the dramatic merits of Pericles there is not much to be said. It is emphatically, not to say exclusively, a play of incidents, with but little of clear and pointed characterization. It has indeed a goodly number of superb strains of poetry; but these for the most part are introduced in such a way as to render it evident that the