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. {205}
It is of course inexplicable, but it is equally of course undeniable,
that the mention of Shakespeare's _Pericles_ would seem immediately and
invariably to recall to a virtuous critical public of nice and nasty mind
the prose portions of the fourth act, the whole of the prose portions of
the fourth act, and nothing but the prose portions of the fourth act. To
readers and writers of books who readily admit their ineligibility as
members of a Society for the Suppression of Shakespeare or Rabelais, of
Homer or the Bible, it will seem that the third and fifth acts of this
ill-fated and ill-famed play, and with them the poetical parts of the
fourth act, are composed of metal incomparably more attractive.
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