silver and tables dance, and "pixy-leads" belated wanderers. "They say it is cider," writes a young lady of Devon, "but the curate has been pixy-led, which proves that cider it cannot be." Not knowing the curate, I cannot speak with her confidence, but that Shakespeare found Puck ready-made in popular tradition is sure and certain. He only added poetry.

Oberon comes from an old French chanson, "Huon of Bordeaux." Of Titania I know less; but the idea of a fairy king and queen is derived from the classic realm of the dead, from Hades and Persephone, Pluto and Proserpine. Chaucer tells of "Proserpine and all her fayrie " in "The Merchant's Tale." Campion sings very sweetly of "the fairy queen Proserpina." That queen whom Thomas the Rhymer loved dwelt in a shadowy land beyond the river of slain men's blood

"For a' the bluid that's shed in earth

Flows through the streams of this countrie."

In the Scottish fairyland Alison Pearson met Maitland of Lethington, who had

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"died a Roman death," as men believed, by his own act. Thus mediæval fairies, in Scotland at least, were neighbors and feudatories of the dead, and thus spirits and fairies blend, the latter, as some deem, thus going back to their original. But there is none of this funereal color about Shakespeare's elfin court, and no touch of the tomb in Oberon and Titania; and Puck is their court jester, "a lob of spirits," but not slow, like other "lobs." That Oberon should be jealous of Theseus, Titania of Hippolyta, "the bouncing Amazon," is a very quaint invention, to be squared with no mythology. As quaint, and to us barely intelligible, is the historical introduction of Mary Stuart as "a mermaid on a dolphin's back." The learned argue on it, and it is true that, for Mary's sake, "certain stars shot madly from their spheres," but we can scarcely believe that the poet was thinking of the murdered Queen of Scots. The fair vestal, Queen Elizabeth, was, by 1594, a very mature vestal indeed, and, by Roman law, might have wedded if she pleased. More than thirty years earlier she had

certainly not been "fancy free." Was Elizabeth ever fancy free, or did her loves go deeper than fancy? But a truce to "scandal about Queen Elizabeth," always a tempting theme, and abundantly accessible. If Shakespeare chose to adulate a sour and dubious virginity, at least he "turned all to favor and to prettiness." It is a splend line,

"And th imperial vot'ress passed on,"

albeit followed by a hackneyed one; and Cupid's fiery shaft, quenched in the cold juice of the western flower, gives the play a fairy motif that is all Shakespeare's own. That his fairies are little folk we learn from the snake's

"enamell'd skin,

Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in."

Thus Shakespeare's fairies, to his fancy, are probably no statelier than Herrick's, which may not be represented on the stage. This makes Titania's infatuation for Bottom as comic as the scandal about Gulliver and the Queen of Lilliput. But **reason and love keep little company," as Bottom very wisely says. The juice of love-in-idleness works thus wildly, and it is well to pray that the juice may never be washed from wedded eyes.

"Lord, what fools these mortals be!"

There is no other word for men and their fond affections.

Bottom brings us to the third thread in the warp and woof of the play-the truly English and human thread. Theseus and his "bouncing Amazon are of the blood of gods, and godlike is their speech. The fairies are all of air and fire and dew. But for Quince and his company, their bones were made in merry England before the populace found its life not worth living, before we had cheap science and polluted air in place of mirth and a moderate learning.

When one thinks of the difference between popular life in Shakespeare's time, the spirit and temper of it, and popular life to-day, one is inclined to blaspheme science, education, the printing - press, progress,' " and all their works. Nobody is a penny the better for them, as far as a happy life is concerned, and what else is worth con

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sidering? However, these things must be as they may. Bottom, being a weaver, has but an incomplete knowledge as to who Pyramus was. Shocking ignorance! But ask your neighbor at any dinner party, delicately find out whether he or she knows. Try the stout British matron, the young man who prattles of Ibsen, the young lady who is interested in the turf. The first will think that Pyramus was a Roman emperor or a Carthaginian general, the second may suggest a pre- Socratic philosopher, and the third will be certain that Pyramus is not in the Cambridgeshire. That is the result of all our bluster about education; nobody (roughly speaking) knows anything worth knowing. Granted that Pyramus is a lover who "kills himself most gallantly for love," Bottom grasps the part: “a lover is more condoling;" and doubtless Bottom burlesqued some actor who then played in Ercles' vein.

Observe in Bottom all the cabotin; he will be both lion and lover, and do all the roaring. He is a born manager. No man can rehearse more "obscenely and courageously." His theory of art, the entire absence of mechanical imitation, the frank statement by the lion as to his personal identity, may seem modern, may seem "impressionist," but it springs from goodness of heart. His request for the tongs and the bones, by way of fairy music, is democratic, as is right. Walt Whitman gives us the tongs and the bones, in a quire of poets: we do not lack for tongs and bones, and many make avowal that they love such harmonies of all things.

On Tongs and Bones-what an exquisite name it is for a volume of new poetry, full of the New Spirit, by a new poet! Surely certain critics would make oath that they had never heard

"So musical a discord, such sweet thunder."

There is in all of Shakespeare's work, perhaps, no contrast so strange and sweet as the fairy song of Puck, after the mumming of the merry sons of toil. There are no verses anywhere so magical and musical as these:

"And we fairies, that do run

By the triple Hecate's team, From the presence of the sun, Following darkness like a dream."