Considering that his two attempts at narrative or rather semi-narrative
and semi-reflective poetry belong obviously to an early stage of his
earliest period, we may rather here than elsewhere take notice that there
are some curious points of coincidence for evil as for good between the
fortunes of Shakespeare's plays and the fortunes of his poems. In either
case we find that some part at least of his earlier and inferior work has
fared better at the blind hands of chance and the brutish hands of
printers than some part at least of his riper and more precious products.
His two early poems would seem to have had the good hap of his personal
supervision in their passage through the press. Upon them, at least
since the time of Coleridge, who as usual has said on this subject the
first and the last word that need be said, it seems to me that fully
sufficient notice and fully adequate examination have been expended; and
that nothing at once new and true can now be profitably said in praise or
in dispraise of them. Of _A Lover's Complaint_, marked as it is
throughout with every possible sign suggestive of a far later date and a
far different inspiration, I have only space or need to remark that it
contains two of the most exquisitely Shakespearean verses ever vouchsafed
to us by Shakespeare, and two of the most execrably euphuistic or
dysphuistic lines ever inflicted on us by man.
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