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and again:

O thou goddess,

Thou divine Nature, how thyself thou blazonest
In these two princely boys They are as gentle
As zephyrs, blowing below the violet

Not wagging his sweet head, and yet as rough,
Their royal blood enchafed, as the rudest wind
That by the top doth take the mountain-pine
And make him stoop to the vale!

'Tis wonder

That an invisible instinct should frame them
To royalty unlearned, honour untaught,
Civility not seen from other, valour

That wildly grows in them, but yields a crop
As if it had been sowed.

This is a different reading of human nature from that to which we are accustomed in this democratic age; but it agrees with the teachings of the modern theory of heredity and evolution.

leveller: he believed that

Shakspeare was no

Clay and clay differs in dignity

Whose dust is both alike.

It is more than likely that the delightful figures of grown-up children with which these plays of his later life abound may have owed something to Shakspeare's own most intimate personal experiences; but it is a much more risky suggestion to hint that possibly

the figures of noble women, equally conspicuous in these plays, may have had something to do with his domestic relations. Every reader of Shakspeare has wondered, many a time, what manner of human being the woman was to whom was appointed the singular lot of being the wife of this greatest of all men of genius-who was six-and-twenty when he married her in his nineteenth year, whom he left in Stratford-onAvon when he went forth to seek his fortune in the world and, as far as is known, never invited to join him in London, but whom he went back to live with in the closing years of his life. What sort of person did he, who had seen and experienced so much, find her to be after the comparative estrangement of these long years? was she, in any degree, fit to be the partner of the thoughts of that mighty mind? There is some evidence that his father's house was one in which earnest religion prevailed, and there is better evidence, also, that the same influence was conspicuous in his own family in the next generation. Religion, where it is experimental and scriptural, is able to deepen and refine natures which have had no advantages of education or society; and it has been conjectured that the wife of Shakspeare, in her loneliness, may have been thrown back on this resource. Did he, on his return, find her to be worthier than he had supposed and worthier, perhaps, than he deserved? His later Comedies, at any rate, abound with women who have

been separated from their husbands, who have been misunderstood and suspected, but who have ever been loyal and whose excellences have, in the long run, been discovered and acknowledged.

It is common to praise the women of Shakspeare's plays, in the bulk, as perfect and matchless expositions of female character, and especially as being in every instance true to nature. So accepted is this criticism that anyone dissenting from it lays himself open to the taunt that, by so doing, he betrays his own incompetence. Yet true criticism is best served by everyone, who has studied the subject with an open mind, saying what he feels; and, I confess, I am not an unlimited admirer of Shakspeare's women. It has been already mentioned that in his day the female characters in the theatre were not played by women, but by boys dressed up as women; and this circumstance could not but have a strong, if unconscious, influence on the mind of the playwriter. Some of Shakspeare's women seem to me exactly this-smart young men in women's clothing. Such is the awful heresy I hold; and I am quite aware how dangerous it is to avow it. But now, let me add, how fervently I love and admire many of the women of Shakspeare. This, indeed, is a theme which has inspired more than one able pen. Mrs. Jameson and Lady Martin have written on it; and the poet Heine has a book entitled "Shakspeare's Maidens and Women". Among Shakspeare's natural and

successful pictures of women there are few that equal those of these Graver Comedies. What portrait of a woman could surpass Hermione, whose solidity of character and patience under injury have something of that monumental quality which seems to be indicated when she stands before her unjust but repentant husband as a statue, but ready to sink into his embrace? or than Imogen, who, when charged with unfaithfulness to her husband, asks with a pudency of virtue white as the innocence of infancy, "What is it to be false"? or than Isabella, whose glowing chastity cannot be moved even by the entreaties of a brother over whose head death is suspended, if she will not yield? These are not all the noble women of this group of plays, but I must not omit the very modern Paulina of A Winter's Tale, who has so tart a tongue for the self-importance and self-deception of men and is, at the same time, so tender and loyal a friend to the Queen she serves.

Side by side with these good women, we have in the Graver Comedies a group of nearly equally good men, mostly kings and princes, such as the Duke in Measure for Measure and the King of France in All's Well That Ends Well. Shakspeare was partial to the princely character, and he employs these royal figures as the mouthpiece for uttering his deepest thoughts on the course of the world and the management of man's life. For the same purpose he employs royal coun

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cillors, like Gonzalo in The Tempest and Lafeu in All's Well That Ends Well-men whose wits have been sharpened by intercourse with all sorts and conditions of men and whose criticism of life has more of salt in it than that of their royal masters. From the lips of such characters there fall moral maxims and eloquent outbursts of wisdom highly characteristic of the poet; indeed, this is the feature which chiefly marks out the Shakspearean drama and lifts even the least considerable of Shakspeare's plays up into a region which is all his own.

Let me cull, almost at random, a handful of such choice sayings:

On the Seasonableness of Speech

The truth you speak doth lack some gentleness
And time to speak it in: you rub the sore

When you should bring the plaster.

On Blessings in Disguise—

Some falls are means the happier to arise.

On Providence

Fortune brings in some boats that are not steered.

On Self-help

Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie

Which we ascribe to Heaven; the fated sky
Gives us free scope; only doth backward pull
Our slow designs when we ourselves are dull.

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