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among
in the immemorial antiquity of Rome,
but they who have not seen her, and
many who have seen her, are still
persuaded that Venice is the city of
their dreams. In Shakespeare's age
she was fascinating for many reasons:
she was the home of orderly freedom;
her constitution was the admiration
of politicians; she was a bulwark of
the West and of the Faith against the
Turk; the Athens of the late Middle
Ages, with Lepanto for her Salamis.
In her the romance of adventure and
the romance of wealth were at one;
her Marco Polo was a traveller more
marvellous than even Genoa's Colum-
bus; her palaces, watching themselves
in her still waterways, were a won-
der of the world; she was the child of
Faith and Freedom, the Bride of the
Adriatic. To "swim in a gondola
was the ambition of the wandering
fancy, and St. Mark's, with the golden
splendor of the storied walls, was a
kind of Mecca of the West.

the cloisters of Oxford, a third commentators scuffle over the ques-
tion, "what was the tranect?" wheth-
er it was the traghetto, or ferry, or not.
And that is all. Some commentators
draw a different conclusion: they
think that Shakespeare could not men-
tion a gondola and the Rialto, and old
Gobbo's present of "a pair of doves,”
without having seen Venice. As well
might one say that an author has vis-
ited Stamboul because he writes of
harems and chibouques and odalisques.
We cannot prove that Shakespeare
was never in North Italy, but it is
clear that he might have written The
Merchant of Venice without seeing the
city of St. Mark. Here we touch a point
in which the mind of Shakespeare and
of his age differs absolutely from ours.
If a modern author were writing a
play about Venice, it would be full of
"local color"; allusions to the Doge's
Palace, to history, to the Cathedral of
St. Mark, to his Lion, to the Grand
Canal, and the Lido, and the Bridge
of Sighs, would be common in every
scene. Compare Byron's Marino Fa-
liero, or Mr. Swinburne's. But these
are nothing to Shakespeare, whose in-
terest is in men and women, and who
from Venice borrows only the magic
of the name and the associations, and
the splendor of the summer moon-
light.

Then in mixing the name of his comedy with the name of Venice, Shakespeare furnished the play with a charm beyond its own, and half won the hearts of his hearers before the curtain rose. Thanks in part to the scene he has chosen, this drama possesses a magic rare even in the comedies of him whose Midsummer-Night's Dream was dreamed in Athens, and whose Rosalind roams in the forest of Arden. Remembering all this, it seems curious to us moderns that in the Merchant of Venice there is not a touch to show that Shakespeare had ever visited the town, not a touch of what we now call "local color." Jessica and Lorenzo are said to have been seen "in a gondola." The Rialto, and the "tranect, the common ferry which trades to Venice," are mentioned; but

"This night, methinks, is but the daylight sick.
It looks a little paler: 'tis a day,
Such as the day is when the sun is hid."

For his scenes he is content with "a street," "a court of justice," "a room in Shylock's house":-they show you the house at Venice, as in duty bound, and as they show Juliet's, a shabby place, at Verona. But we may be pretty certain that Shakespeare never "made a note of it," nor, I think, is there a line in the play to prove that he ever was in Italy. About the

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date of the events, as conceived of by him, it is only certain that it falls between his own time and the discovery of Mexico, to which Antonio traded. Here, as everywhere, he is the least pedantic of poets, no more concerned with local color and local costume than Titian was about the garments worn and the implements used in Palestine by the apostles. Mr. Abbey has diligently sought out, in his designs, the kind of costume worn by Venetians of that age, and the red cap that marked the Jew. But it was all one to Shakespeare.

The same lordly indifference declares itself in the plot and action and sentiments of the comedy. Shake speare probably worked on a much older canvas, a piece called The Jew, representing" the greediness of worldly chusers and bloody minds of usurers," as Gosson writes in the School of Abuse (1579), published many years before Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice. The Jew is lost-vile damnum, probably-but if we had it we might better understand certain compromises which must have been forced on Shakespeare. He was not working on fresh material, but on topics already familiar. He only gave charm, poetry, romance, to an elder drama, and had to put up with certain traditional conditions. This makes it even more difficult than usual to discover what was his own opinion as to the moral and artistic problems of the play. The plot combines at least two very old stories, stories of the ancient traditional sort, and the necessities of the stage compelled certain changes in these to be made. Why, for example, is Antonio so devoted to Bassanio?

The original story ranges better, I think, with Mr. Abbey's drawings of Antonio than the play does itself.

Mr. Abbey's Antonio has a Venetian type of face, it is true, studied from an authentic portrait. But the face, to my mind, is of an older and a less melancholy man than Shakespeare's Antonio. Now, in the story (published in Il Pecorone, 1558) the person who takes Antonio's rôle is an elderly man, the godfather and guardian of Bassanio. For a favorite godchild and ward, a man of this Antonio's age will do more than most merchants will do for a friend; indeed, sentimental friendships were rare "on the Rialto." In the old story Bassanio loses two of his godfather's argosies on bets to the lady of Belmont, who will marry any man that can keep awake on his bridal night, but who takes his wealth if he slumbers untimely. The idea is an old one, and is found in some Scotch ballads. The third time Bassanio avoids the sleeping draught which drowsed him twice before, and wins the lady, but he tarries at Belmont so long that Antonio (I use the names as in the play) loses the wager of the pound of flesh to the Jew. Bassanio hurries home, the lady of Belmont plays the lawyer's part, the incident of the ring follows, and all ends well. To avoid the dramatically impossible points of this legend, the author of the old play, The Jew, must have introduced the other most ancient story of the three caskets and the "worldly chusers "—an expedient followed by Shakespeare. But, as the plot is now constructed, we rather lack a motive for Antonio's devotion to Bassanio. Nor have we, as the play stands, a motive for Antonio's melancholy. "In sooth, I know not why I am so sad," he says. Was there a motive, which Shakespeare rejected, in The Jew? He is always gloomy. When he ex

PORTIA. "Away then: I am lock'd in one of them; if you do love me, you will find me out."-Act III., Scene II.

pects death at Shylock's hands, he Shylock to the level of Fagin, the says: