Lo, here upon thy cheek the stain doth sit
Of an old tear, that is not wash'd off yet:
If e'er thou wast thyself, and these woes thine,
Thou and these woes were all for Rosaline.

And in the scene immediately following this, where Romeo meets with his two friends in the morning, after stealing from them the night before by leaping Capulet's orchard wall, we find Mercutio exclaiming

Ah, that same pale hard-hearted wench, that Rosaline, torments him so, that he will sure run mad ;

and again,—

Alas, poor Romeo, he is already dead!-stabbed with a white wench's black eye-shot through the ear with a love-song-the very pin of his heart cleft with the blind bow-boy's butt-shaft. —And is he a man to encounter Tybalt?

From all this we gather that Romeo is suffering from the kind of rejection most tormenting to a nature like his proceeding not from any preference on the part of his mistress for another, or any aversion to himself but simply from her own passionless character-very different, it must be owned, from that other Rosaline, of the 'Love's Labour's Lost,' whom Biron describes as

A whitely wanton, with a velvet brow, &c.

Romeo's Rosaline, too, according to Mercutio's testimony, is "a white wench," black-eyed: but "she hath forsworn to love." This is, naturally, the last species of determination that any lover can bring himself to consider final in his mistress; and is precisely that most calculated to drive to madness a lover at once so exquisitely and so intensely sensitive and imaginative as Romeo. It is the same, for example, which, in Cervantes's beautiful and well-known story of the shepherdess Marcella, drives the enamoured Chrysostom, a character of Romeo's temperament, to despair and suicide. It is when the flow of imaginative passion, neither checked by aversion in its object, nor diverted by jealousy of a rival, is simply turned

back upon itself by indifference, that it exhibits the phenomena which, while they are wildest to the apprehension of the observer, are most torturing and most perilous to the subject of them.

This it is-this violent recoil of the feelings and the fancy-not the mere love of "descanting to his companions in pretty phrases," as Mrs. Jameson rather strangely supposes-that wrings from Romeo's breast those antithetical exclamations,

O heavy lightness! serious vanity!

Mis-shapen chaos of well-seeming forms!

Feather of lead! bright smoke! cold fire! sick health!
Still-waking sleep, &c.

This state of his mind is no subject of jocularity to any one of his friends, excepting that same Mercutio whom we find incapable of gravity even under the consciousness of his own mortal wound. Romeo, indeed, asks Benvolio, at the end of the passage last cited, "Dost thou not laugh?"-but Benvolio answers him, "No, coz, I rather weep." And to Romeo's reply, "Good heart, at what?" his kind-hearted cousin rejoins, "At thy good heart's oppression."

Benvolio, indeed, sees the matter perfectly right; and accordingly persists in administering that species of "good counsel," to repeat the words of the elder Montague, which alone, under the peculiar circumstances, "may the cause remove." And so, in his second colloquy with his enamoured cousin, he resumes the strain wherewith he had closed the former :

Ben. Tut, man! one fire burns out another's burning, One pain is lessen'd by another's anguish ;

Turn giddy, and be holp by backward turning;

One desperate grief cures with another's languish ;

Take thou some new infection to thy eye,

And the rank poison of the old will die.

Rom. Your plantain leaf is excellent for that.
Ben. For what, I pray thee?

Rom.

For your broken shin.

Ben. Why, Romeo, art thou mad?

Rom. Not mad, but bound more than a madman is ;

Shut up in prison, kept without my food,

Whipp'd, and tormented, and- -Good e'en, good fellow. Capulet's Servant. God gi' good e'en. I pray, sir, can you read?

Rom. Ay, mine own fortune in my misery.

Ben. At this same ancient feast of Capulet's
Sups the fair Rosaline whom thou so lov'st,
With all the admired beauties of Verona :
Go thither; and, with unattainted eye,
Compare her face with some that I shall shew,
And I will make thee think thy swan a crow.

Rom. When the devout religion of mine eye
Maintains such falsehood, then turn tears to fires!
And these-who, often drown'd, could never die—
Transparent heretics, be burnt for liars !—
One fairer than my love!—the all-seeing sun
Ne'er saw her match, since first the world begun!
Ben. Tut! you saw her fair, none else being by,
Herself pois'd with herself, in either eye;

But in those crystal scales let there be weigh'd
Your lady-love against some other maid

That I will shew you, shining at this feast,

And she shall scant shew well, that now shews best.
Rom. I'll go along, no such sight to be shown,
But to rejoice in splendour of mine own!—

that is, to gaze at leisure on the charms of the inaccessible Rosaline, whose name he finds among those of the guests invited to Capulet's entertainment.

Having now brought Romeo to the threshold of the scene which changes and decides his destiny, it is time for us to consider the character and position of Juliet as indicated in the scenes preceding that of the masquerade.

3.-JULIET.-HER MEETING WITH ROMEO.

In accordance with his leading dramatic object in this play, its author has assigned to its heroine the most youthful age that would admit of his exhibiting the

perfect moral development of the girl into the woman, and of the maid into the wife, by the agency of that passion which is here his principal theme:

My child is yet a stranger in the world,

She hath not seen the change of fourteen years,

says her father, in his first dialogue with her accepted suitor Paris-this particular number of years being evidently chosen by the dramatist with a proper regard to the early maturity belonging to a southern clime.

As we find Romeo to be an only son, so Juliet, we learn also from her father, is an only surviving child

The earth hath swallow'd all my hopes but she,

She is the hopeful lady of my earth.

The following scene, between herself, her lady mother, and her foster-nurse, distinctly sets before us the nature of the moral relations existing between the youthful heroine and the only two beings of her own sex with whom she has been brought up in habitual intimacy. Lady Capulet seems the very type of a cold, authoritative, aristocratic matron, who, so far from being in the confidence of any one feeling in her daughter's breast, has not once entertained the notion that this daughter may by possibility have feelings, and so be capable of preferences, of her own. In the affair of marriage, it is plain that no such considerations have ever troubled the elder lady in her own particular case; and so, arguing directly from herself to her daughter, she sums up the whole business to her own entire satisfaction in the following words to Juliet :—

Younger than you,
Here in Verona, ladies of esteem,
Are made already mothers: by my count,

I was your mother much upon these years
That you are now a maid.

The Nurse, then, may well be excused for having little solicitude in the matter, beyond that of seeing

her

latest and favourite foster-child married to somebody:

Thou wast the prettiest babe that e'er I nurs’d:

An I might live to see thee married once,

I have my wish.

We see that, in spite of all other differences, the
essential vulgarity of view regarding the affair of
marriage in the abstract, is precisely the same in the
dignified and decorous, but stern and heartless mother
of quality, as it is in the humble and illiterate foster-
nurse, with her coarse but sincere fondness, and her
low, garrulous humour. Lady Capulet, accordingly,
calls in the Nurse as her most appropriate seconder in
giving her daughter to understand what a delightful
thing it must be, in any case, for a young lady to get
a husband:-
:-

Nurse, give leave awhile,
We must talk in secret.- -Nurse, come back again;
I have remember'd me, thou shalt hear our counsel.
Thou knowst, my daughter's of a pretty age, &c.

When the Nurse has so elegantly prepared the way, by the winding-up of her gossiping reminiscences of Juliet's infancy

To see, now, how a jest shall come about, &c.

her ladyship, in a truly business-like spirit, loses no time in coming to the point:

Thus then, in brief

The valiant Paris seeks you for his love.

Nurse. A man, young lady!-lady, such a man

As all the world-Why, he's a man of wax!

Lady Cap. Verona's summer hath not such a flower.
Nurse. Nay, he's a flower-in faith, a very flower!

Lady Cap. What say you? can you love the gentleman?

No matter that her daughter has yet no personal knowledge whatever of this same exquisite Count Paris. Her lady mother evidently expects already a categorical answer to this last question; but receiving none, condescends to particularise a little more:

DD