If, however, there be any lurking notion in your correspondent's mind, that the scene in _Antony and Cleopatra_ (Act III. Sc. 1) referred to by X. Z. (Vol. iii., p. 139.) is, judging from certain coincidences of expression, an interpolation, and not by Shakspeare, I beg at once to be allowed to express my total dissent from such a view. Whether, also, there may have been any secondary allusion to some known event of the day, as X. Z. supposes, and as is by no means improbable, I cannot say; but I protest against its being said that the scene referred to is "totally unconnected with what goes before, and what follows." Antony is the hero of the play; and this scene shows the culminating point of Antony's fortunes, when his very successes turn against him.
To return to _Henry VIII._, the compliment to the Queen, to which your correspondent refers, is, as he very justly observes, brought in in a very forced manner. This, to my mind, is very strong evidence; otherwise I should not think it unworthy of Shakspeare. And it still has to be borne in mind, that he would have had to accommodate his characters and circumstances to the views of another writer. Shakspeare's spirit was too catholic, too universal, to have allowed, in a work entirely his own, even his Wolsey to have made use of the term "a spleeny Lutheran;" yet neither in the passage in which this expression occurs, nor in the one above referred to, is the versification characteristic of Fletcher. For my own part, however, I cannot recognise Shakspeare's spirit in this antagonism of creeds, which is, perhaps, even more strongly displayed in the prophetic speech of Cranmer's in the last scene, wherein he says, "God shall be truly known!" It may be said, that in both these instances the expressions are true to the characters of Wolsey and Cranmer. It may be so; for both are wanting in that ideal elevation which Shakspeare never fails to give. That, with this reservation, he becomes the mouth-piece of each character, is most true; and a curious instance of the writer's utter forgetfulness of his assumed character of contemporary with the events he is relating, occurring in Act. IV. Sc. 2 where Griffiths says--
"He was most princely: ever witness for him Those twins of learning, that he rais'd in you, Ipswich and Oxford! _one of which fell with him_, Unwilling to outlive the good that did it; The other, though unfinish'd, yet so famous, So excellent in art, _and still so rising_,"--