The oftener I read these verses, amongst the very earliest compositions
of Shakspere, I am the more impressed with the carefulness with which he
represents the _work_ of the picture--"shows the strife of the painter."
The most natural thought to follow in sequence is: How like his own art!
The scope and variety of the whole picture, in which mass is effected by
the accumulation of individuality; in which, on the one hand, Troy
stands as the impersonation of the aim and object of the whole; and on
the other, the Simois flows in foaming rivalry of the strife of
men,--the pictorial form of that sympathy of nature with human effort
and passion, which he so often introduces in his plays,--is like nothing
else so much as one of the works of his own art. But to take a portion
as a more condensed representation of his art in combining all varieties
into one harmonious whole: his genius is like the oratory of Nestor as
described by its effects in the seventh and eighth stanzas. Every
variety of attitude and countenance and action is harmonized by the
influence which is at once the occasion of debate, and the charm which
restrains by the fear of its own loss: the eloquence and the listening
form the one bond of the unruly mass.
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