Every possible reader, I suppose, will at once bethink himself of the
famous passage in _Measure for Measure_ which here may seem to be faintly
prefigured:
It were as good
To pardon him that hath from nature stolen
A man already made, as to remit
Their saucy sweetness, that do coin heaven's image
In stamps that are forbid:
and the very difference of style is not wider than the gulf which gapes
between the first style of Shakespeare and the last. But men of
Shakespeare's stamp, I venture to think, do not thus repeat themselves.
The echo of the passage in _A Midsummer Night's Dream_, describing the
girlish friendship of Hermia and Helena, which we find in the first act
of _The Two Noble Kinsmen_, describing the like girlish friendship of
Emilia and Flavina, is an echo of another sort. Both, I need hardly say,
are unquestionably Shakespeare's; but the fashion in which the matured
poet retouches and completes the sketch of his earlier years--composes an
oil painting, as it were, from the hints and suggestions of a
water-colour sketch long since designed and long since half forgotten--is
essentially different from the mere verbal and literal trick of
repetition which sciolists might think to detect in the present instance.
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