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"Titus Andronicus' is, distinctive ly, a play of wrong and revenge-of black Revenge" that has "palfreys black as jet" for her wagon (Act v. Scene 2). So in So in "Henry IV.," Revenge lives in an ebon den," and in "Othello," the other tragedy with a Moor in it, vengeance is "black" vengeance. The "fatal raven" flies more often in this play than in any other. So in Hamlet':

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"HAM. The croaking raven

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Doth bellow for revenge.

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Luc. Thoughts black . agreeing." Lavinia calls the Empress's paramour her raven-colored love," and immediately afterward, when pleading for her chastity and life, is ill-advised enough to draw a simile of mercy from the raven. Titus, addressing Aaron-whose every note was of ill-omen and boding, but who has come, the damned villain, with a pretended reprieve for Titus's sons, already murdered as a raven, compares his voice with a lark's song. "Did ever raven sing so like a lark

That gives sweet tidings of the sun's up

rise?"

Now this characteristic trifle is worth noting. Lavinia had contrasted the raven with the lark

"The raven doth not hatch a lark"

-the extreme opposites in voice; and Titus, not having heard Lavinia do so, does the same. There is more excuse, of course, where one has heard the

other, even in the use of so preposterous a word as "discandy," which Antony exchanges with Cleopatra. Shakespeare does this so often that examples may be found in probably every play. A fancy occurs to him: he uses it twice or even three times in rapid succession-and never again throughout his plays. To take an illustration from "Titus An

dronicus" itself. Aaron, counselling the outrage on Lavinia, says, "The woods are ruthless, dreadful, deaf, and dull"; and Titus, lamenting the outrage, but not having heard Aaron, says, "The woods are ruthless, vast, and gloomy." No one less than Shakespeare would do this, in this inartistic way. But Shakespeare often did not even read over his manuscript. As it was written so it stands, the first thoughts of his mind, and the wonder of time to the last.

There are other touches of natural

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blackness in the play. The Moor calls himself a black dog," and again, defending the color of his offspring, says:

"Coal-black is better than another hue;

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In that it scorns to bear another hue.
For all the water in the ocean

Can never turn a swan's black legs to white,
Although she lave them hourly in the flood."

This is not the only time that Shakespeare forgets that the swan is a freshwater bird. Why did not the writer say all the water in the Tiber," which in which the speaker stood? Because was flowing past the walls of the Palace bird in "Antony and Cleopatra." he was Shakespeare who makes it a sea

which no new-hatched thing is blackThe Moor's child is "a tadpole" (than er), "as loathsome as a toad,'-the "black" toad of Shakespeare elsewhere contrast to the joyful, fair and happy -"a joyless, black, dismal issue," in 'issue'' in other plays.

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The crowning wrong of the playfor which the Andronici take revengeis the rape and mutilation of Lavinia. It is obvious, of course, what Shakespeare had just "been reading late," but that does not affect the continuity of his natural history, and, for the purpose of this article, matters nothing.

of Tereus and Philomela was buzzing It is sufficient to say that the story in his head. The scene opens in "a desert part of the forest," with Aaron busy burying a bag of gold. To him enters Tamora and says:

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Now compare this with the Passionate calls it "a fleece of woolly hair." In Pilgrim's

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"Hark, Tamora,

Philomel must lose her tongue to-day." Now the Passionate Pilgrim,

“Save the nightingale alone.” Thereafter the story of Philomela and Tereus runs its course. But I venture to think that its introduction in the very words, almost, of one of Shakespeare's admitted poems, is a coincidence not likely to have been ventured upon by a contemporary plagiarist. Again, Titus speaking of Lavinia's mouth as a birdcage, calls her tongue the delightful engine of her thoughts." The same phrase, engine of her thoughts," occurs in " Venus and Adonis.

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It is to be noted that Shakespeare, who had unmistakably heard the nightingale singing-which few poets who have written about it seem to have done -always makes the bird female. This is only an illustration of the logician's "fallacy from antiquity," and of the influence of the "Philomela" legend upon the poet.

There is nothing noteworthy of the other bird-references of the play. The "fatal" raven "that croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan" ("Macbeth," i. 5), the "nightly'' owl, the "gnawing" vulture, and the "swift" swallow, are all in Shakespeare's usual phrase, and familiar to us throughout his plays.

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There are very few Reptiles" in the play-Shakespeare, by the way, never uses that word once throughout his works and such as there are suggest little comment. Aaron describes his hair, uncurling, "even as an adder, when she doth unroll to do some fatal execution." This could be better understood if we pictured to ourselves the wanton Empress displacing with her arms some turban head-dress under which Aaron kept his long black locks coiled, if it were not that the Moor * As some of the natives of Asia and Africa

do.

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another place he speaks of his offspring as thick-lipped,' and so it may be assumed that Shakespeare by "Moor" meant really the "black-a-moor," the negro. Now, it is not easy to imagine yet Aaron evidently wishes to draw a negro's hair coming out of curl, and his paramour's attention to the fact that his hair is "standing on end," and uses the metaphor of the unrolling adder," because she happened to say that she had just seen a snake rolled in the

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cheerful sun." She has invited him to her arms, addressing him thus :

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My lovely Aaron, wherefore lookst thou sad,
When everything doth make a gleeful boast ?
The birds chaunt melody on every bush,
The snake lies rolled in the cheerful sun.
. Let us sit," etc.

Aaron replies, taking up each of her points in succession, the joyousness, the merry voices, the lazy happy snake, and her amorousness:

"Madam, though Venus govern your desires,
Saturn is dominator over mine:
What signifies my deadly-standing eye,
My silence, and my cloudy melancholy?
My fleece of woolly hair that now uncurls,
Even as an adder, when she doth unroll
To do some fatal execution ?"

And then goes on:

"Vengeance is in my heart, death in my hand, Revenge and blood are hammering in my head."

"

In Macbeth," when the Thane of Glamis has already become Thane of Cawdor, and the idea of fulfilling the Witches' prophecy as to his becoming King, by murdering Duncan, first comes into his mind, we read :

"That suggestion Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair, And make my seated heart knock at my ribs !” The snake" rolled in the cheerful sun' is a touch from Nature that occurs elsewhere in Shakespeare. In "Julius Cæsar" is a line, the bright day that brings the adder forth," and in "Henry VI., Part 2 (in which the serpent-folk are curiously numerous), we have "the snake rolled in a flowery bank"-a very

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common object of the country" to myself and Marlborough schoolfellows, who knew exactly the sunny days and sunny spots where and when snake and adder and blindworm were to be found

basking. This love of warmth gives perhaps more peculiar than extensive. the point to the line (iii. 1):

"That kiss is comfortless,

As frozen water to a starvèd snake."

The other allusion to snakes is in Tamora's enumeration of the horrors which Lavinia and her husband were supposed to have prepared for her, "a thousand hissing snakes ;" and it is a coincidence that on the only other occasion that Shakespeare places a scene under a "mossy" tree, there should be both beasts of prey and venomous reptiles beneath its shade. Tamora describes the trees as "o'ercome with moss," and here are snakes and, so says Aaron, a panther. In "As You Like It," Oliver relates how, under a tree, "whose boughs were mossed," he be

held a snake and a lioness.

"An insignificance, dear sir, no doubt, And yet not all significance without The toad goes with the snake in every accumulation of horrors in Shakespeare, and is therefore found here ("ten thousand swelling toads"), and not only by direct mention but, as Shakespeare so very frequently employs it, by suggestion.

"The venomous malice of my swelling heart," says Aaron. So Pericles of the swelling

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But a more exact coincidence will be found in "Henry VI.," where Gloster speaks of

"The envious malice of thy swelling heart," to the Bishop of Winchester-the exact words of Aaron, except that "venomous" takes the place of "envious." Now Shakespeare uses the two words as synonymous ("envenomed with his envy" in "Hamlet," and so forth), and Envy when symbolized is the toad.

My "deadly standing eye" in the above passage is, of course, an allusion to that special favorite of Shakespeare, the basilisk-cockatrice, with the

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fatal," killing, 'deadly," murdering," and and death-darting" orb"whose unavoided eye is murderous." Shakespeare never pays much attention to Insects. Nobody did in his day. So the entomology of his plays is

In "Titus Andronicus" we find (see above) Tamora encouraging her sons to the unremunerative task of robbing wasps of their honey, and later (v. 1)

we read :

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Shakespeare had been reading translations of the classics in which are suggested both of the errors implied in the lines quoted. When Virgil or Ovid speaks of leading bees to flowered fields the poet refers to the practice in Southern Europe, doubtless unknown to Shakespeare, of transporting whole farms of hives on large-decked boats from pasturage to pasturage, but is it likely that the English dramatist, addressing audiences of bee-keepers (for bee-keeping was, in those days, an almost universal country practice) would speak of "stinging" bees "following their master," in a friendly spirit, and on the "hottest summer's day," too? Critics need hardly have discussed such nonsense. The other error, which Shakespeare's audience shared with him, was that bees have a king. Pliny is delightful on this theme, and Virgil has some arch of the hive, and it is this mistake, charming references to the male mona sufficiently simple one, and not the other, obviously foolish, that Shakespeare made. It was "the magister of the hive," "the master- bee," that led them. Not the human owner of the hive. Elsewhere, he makes the male bee produce honey, and calls the neuters, as every other poet does, she.

There is a very striking passage in "Titus Andronicus" of which a fly is the subject. Shakespeare hated flies as heartily as Martin Luther-and especially their buzzing. So in this place, where Titus affects a great indignation with his brother for killing a fly, and talks pitifully of its poor father and mother," its "gilded wings" and "pretty buzzing melody," Shakespeare means to show us Titus going mad.

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Give me thy knife," he says to Marcus, "I will insult on him," and he stabs the dead fly repeatedly.

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says his brother, as Titus, having done with the fly, rises to go. In another part of the play (iv. 4) the Emperor, complaining of the popular agitation in favor of the ill-used Andronici, says:

"These disturbers of our peace Buz in the people's ears"

a frequent expression in Shakespeare and nearly always used in the same uncomplimentary sense to the fly as lying, mischievous, or annoying.

If I were to follow out all my notes further into the flora, the meteorology, the precious stones, and inanimate nature generally, of the play, I could easily treble the matter of this article,

but my argument, I venture to think, requires no further strengthening.

As a matter of fact, Shakespeare has never yet been seriously approached on the side of his natural history. His references to Nature in some departments have been catalogued, but there has never been any intention hitherto to establish the individuality or identity of the man Shakespeare from his natural history, nor to study it as a whole with relation to the writer. It may be a matter for surprise that it should have been left for me, an unaccredited student of the Bard, and at the end of this century, to look at Shakespeare from a new point of view. But the fact remains.-Contemporary Review.

DEFENCE NOT DEFIANCE.

WHEN "the great and good Linnæus" first saw gorse in blossom on Wimbledon Common, he fell on his knees, says the veracious legend, and thanked God audibly then and there for having created so glorious and unique a combination of color and perfume. It was a bright sunny day, no doubt, in early spring, and Wimbledon Common must have been somewhat more picturesque in Linnæus's time than in its existing suburban condition; but even so, the act savors of the eighteenth century. Let us frankly admit, between ourselves, 'twas just a trifle theatrical. It reminds one of Gibbon on his own fat marrowbones. The age of the Georges loved these affected little displays of what it called "sensibility." The traveller fresh back from Abyssinia or New Holland was expected to go down upon all fours on Portsmouth Hard in the rap ture of his return, and kiss with fervor the sacred soil of England. So Linnæus may be excused for his too obtrusive gratitude, to the damage of his smallclothes, on the ground that, after all, he just followed the fashion. A man who really meant it would have abstained, I fancy, from the overt act of falling on his knees, and if he thanked Heaven at all, would have thanked it silently.

On the main point, however, I am at one with Linnæus. Few plants on earth

are more beautiful than our English furzes; and an English moor, aglow with yellow gorse and on fire with purple heather, is a lovelier sight than anything to be seen among the unvaried dark green of tropical forests. Moreover, the human race in these islands owes much to those refulgent flowers; for we all know that "when the gorse is out of blossom, then is kissing out of fashion ;" and the gorse has managed, by flowering all the year round, to prevent inconvenience to many million pairs of human lovers. Yet I cannot find that any historian of our flora has yet treated the benignant though prickly plant at proper length in any exhaustive monograph. I propose, therefore, to meet this felt want in the literature of the subject by devoting a few pages of scientific gossip to the various kinds of gorse, their origin, development, and subsequent fortunes.

The life-history of the common furze is a singular and interesting one. In its adult stage, as everybody knows who has ever attempted to pick a flowering branch of the bright golden bloom, it is conspicuously and I will even venture to say unpleasantly prickly. But as the young Nero refused with tears to sign a deathwarrant, and as Robespierre declined a judgeship rather than pass capital sentence upon a fellow-creature, so the many-spined gorse, which in its maturer

years sheds your blood without pity, is in its infant stage as gentle and shrinking a plant as that pet of poets, the modest violet. If you take a few little beans out of the ripe pods on a furze-bush and bury them in a flower-pot, you will find the tiny seedlings which sprout from the seeds are entirely ungorselike. They have broad and flattened trefoil leaves-in point of fact they are essentially clovers. You may observe similar trefoil leaves on adult bushes of the pretty yellow genista so commonly cultivated in conservatories and windowgardens. Young gorse-plants when they first come up are to all intents and purposes in the genista stage; it is only as they grow up and begin to realize their proper position in life as furze-bushes, that they set about developing their murderous spines and prickles.

Why is this? Well, the young plant and the young animal often recapitulate to some extent the evolutionary history of their race and species. Thus the common frog begins life as a tadpole, which is essentially a fish with gills and swimming organs; while he ends it as a frog, which is essentially a reptile, breathing by means of lungs, and hopping on all fours on terra firma. So too the human embryo in its earliest stage exhibits gilllike slits like a fish's; and, later on, resembles roughly at various times the reptile, the lower mammals, and the ancestral monkey. Now the progenitors of gorse were soft and innocent shrubs with trefoil leaves, like clover or genista; but as they grew for the most part on very open stretches of down or moorland, they were exposed to be eaten down by deer and rabbits, sheep, cattle, and horses. Under these circumstances, only the prickliest and thorniest among them stood a chance of surviving; and, indeed, you may observe that almost all the vegetation on our English commons is well defended by sharp spines against the attacks of herbivores. Waste lands in Britain are overgrown with brambles, blackthorn, junipers, and furze-bushes; while even the smaller plants, like butcher's broom and carline, are offensively prickly. Nay, more the pretty little rest-harrow, with its dainty purple pea blossoms, which is commonly unarmed in fields and meadows, has developed on the commons of Kent and

Surrey, and on continental waysides, a spiny variety for purposes of self-protection. Only the thistle-loving donkey and the close-cropping goose can manage to pick up an honest living anyhow on such pungent provender.

So the infant furze-bush recapitulates for us in full the whole history of the origin and development of its species. For when the little beans begin to sprout, the first things to appear above ground are two simple round seedleaves. These represent for us the fundamental common ancestor of the whole tribe of pea-blossoms; no matter which of them you sow, you will find the earliest stage consists invariably of these two round seed-leaves. The pea, the bean, the furze-bush, the laburnum, the wisteria (which young ladies will call "westaria"), the tiny clover, and the huge American acacia or locust-tree, all alike belong to this single family, readily distinguished from all others by its butterfly-winged flowers, and all begin life, from Alaska to Australia, with the self-same pair of simple round seedleaves. But next after the round leaves in the seedling gorse come three or four little hairy trefoils, like those of clover or laburnum on a smaller scale; and this second type of foliage is a reminiscence of the time when the ancestors of furze were simple trefoil bearing bushes exactly resembling the greenhouse genista. Above the clover-like leaves again, the seedling begins to put forth single narrow blades, but flattened and leaf-like, not round and prickly as in the older bushes. Gradually, as the plant increases in stature and wisdom, it learns to produce stiffer and more conical leaves, which pass by degrees into thorns or prickles. In the adult state, all the branches end in a stout spine, and the leaves being also spiny, it requires the eye and the faith of a trained botanist to distinguish between them. But the seedling shoots still give us the history of gorse and its evolution in brief; they supply for us every intermediate stage from the pretty trefoil through the narrow flat leaf, growing rounder and sharper as the stem mounts upward, to the murderous prickles of the full-grown furze-bush.

Our common English broom, which I earnestly trust all readers of this Mag

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