hive. Under Providence, he says, there is special work in the world for everybody, and the faithful concurrence of the whole, duly performed, is "like music.”

Therefore doth heaven divide

The state of man in divers functions,
Setting endeavour in continual motion,
To which is fixèd, as an aim or butt,
Obedience.

So work the honey-bees,
Creatures that, by rule in nature, teach
The act of order to a peopled kingdom.
They have a king, and officers of sorts;
Where some, like magistrates, correct at home;
Others, like merchants, venture trade abroad;
Others, like soldiers, armèd in their stings,
Make boot upon the summer's velvet buds;
Which pillage they, with merry march, bring home
To the tent-royal of their emperor,

Who, busied in his majesty, surveys

The singing masons building roofs of gold;
The civil citizens kneading up the honey;
The poor mechanic porters crowding in
Their heavy burdens at his narrow gate;
The sad-eyed justice, with his surly hum,
Delivering o'er to executors pale

The lazy, yawning drone.-King Henry the Fifth, i., 2. As an account of the domestic economy of the honeybees, this most beautiful description, it hardly needs the saying, is inexact. Bee-life, in the Shaksperean age, had not been studied. The main idea, however, is faithfully put, and it is for the reader who knows the particular truth to correct it mentally as he reads. There are many other allusions to bees and honey, in all, probably, not fewer than thirty. In All's Well, for instance,

This he wished,

Since I nor wax, nor honey, can bring home,
I quickly were dissolvèd from my hive,
To give some labourers room.-(i., 2.)
Some of them are very beautifully figurative:—

O my love, my wife!

Death that hath suck'd the honey of thy breath,
Upon thy beauty yet hath had no power.
Thou art not conquer'd; beauty's ensign yet
Is crimson in thy lips, and in thy cheeks,
And death's pale flag is not advanced there.

Romeo and Juliet, v., 3.

Chapter Tenth.

CULTIVATED FRUITS, ESCULENT VEGETABLES,

AND MEDICINAL HERBS.

Think'st thou it honourable for a noble man
Still to remember wrongs?-Coriolanus, v., 3.
The rarer action is

In virtue than in vengeance.--Tempest, v., I.

HE interest of the Shaksperean references to the garden fruits and vegetables of his period, and to the herbs grown for medicinal purposes, consists chiefly in the information they afford as to the horticulture of the Elizabethan age, and the value then attached to simple herb-physic. The circumstances amid which these references occur are seldom poetical. They differ altogether from the beautiful surroundings of the flowers. Sometimes they are distinctly unpleasing; and the characters with whom they are identified are

often of third-rate position in the drama.

For completeness' sake, it is of course proper to recognise these various allusions, bearing in mind, at the same time, that many of them may quite possibly not be Shakspere's own, but the unfair interpolations of actors or transcribers. The associations are usually quite lateral. These fruits and so forth seem to be introduced, not so much because of their merits, as to illustrate the jocularity of the speaker, or to serve as the basis of a pun or a double entendre. Shakspere wrote his plays, no doubt, with a view to their being performed before audiences to whom amusement and broad farce were more welcome than poetry and philosophy. He knew that he must supply material for fun, and this he did supremely. He is entitled, nevertheless, to the full benefit of the doubt whether the vulgarities and the impurities may not have been inserted by other hands. No manuscripts of his own, as already said, are in existence. Between the time of the original writing of the dramas and the first printing there was plenty of opportunity for desecration, and the desecration would be carried still further by players who found it to their interest to interpolate expressions adapted to "bring down the house," these getting by degrees into the successive manuscript copies. Pope pointed out, more than one hundred and sixty years ago (his edition of Shakspere having been published in 1721), that the Romeo and Juliet of the famous "first folio"-the first collective edition of the plays, issued in 1623 by the two players Heminges and Condell

contains many mean conceits and ribaldries of which there is no hint in the early single-play editions. It cannot be supposed for a moment that these were inserted by Shakspere as after-thoughts. Surely their introduction must have been after the manner indicated.

That Shakspere had no real and personal love for low quibbles and other such vulgarities, he himself plainly shows us in the Merchant of Venice, iii., 5, illustrating, as in many other places, his own private ideas, without an atom of ostentation. Launcelot, old Shylock's coarse and ignorant serving-man, talks rudely to Jessica. While they are conversing, he is interrupted by the entrance of Lorenzo, who, if not one of the foremost of the Shaksperean characters, is distinguished at least for his reverence, his good common-sense, and other qualities of the gentleman. It is to Lorenzo that at a more pleasing time we owe the sublimest burst of reverent poetry in the whole of Shakspere:

How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!
Here will we sit, and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears. Soft stillness and the night,
Become the touches of sweet harmony.

Sit, Jessica. Look, how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines* of bright gold!

*"Patines, small golden dishes employed in the ritual of the Catholic Church." The stars bear no resemblance to these. Surely, as proposed, the better word would be patterns—i.e., designs or beautiful geometrical sketches and methods of arrangement, as set forth in the constellations, Orion, in its season, Cassiopeia, and the sleepless Seven, with all the rest of the host of heaven, “shedding sweet influence."

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