couch with blood, you cannot expect to taste sweet sleep upon it, nor would you be the nearer enjoying it if you stretched your limbs on an uneasy pallet in some smoky crib:

The mind is its own place, and in itself

Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.

ESSAY XII

PHILOSOPHY: COMMUNISM-RIGHTS OF WOMEN

ETHNOLOGY

CIVILISATION, it is admitted, moves in cycles, and as it touches in its progress certain points of its orbit, similar phenomena present themselves, and are denominated the characteristics of the age. When history comes to deal with us, it will probably enumerate among the most marked features of the period our communistic dreams, and wild agitations about women's rights. Ask Time to turn back his glass, and set us down in the Athenian agora four hundred years before Christ, and we shall find Lysistrata contending victoriously with the statesmen and orators, and Praxagora projecting a division of property and a community of women. Nay, if we take a turn in the Acropolis, we may contemplate the Graces sculptured by a philosopher who put on motley with the same Praxagora, and, like many great female thinkers of the present day, pronounced marriage to be a mistake. But how do we find Shakespeare involved in these discussions ? By his practice, if not by his teaching-I mean his practice in the plays. He employs women in important negotiations of State, pits them against kings and princes, and shows how, in the management of public affairs, their subtle and delicate wits often prove more than a match for the cumbersome machinery of the

masculine brain. In 'Love's Labour's Lost' a French princess is sent by her father, as his diplomatic representative, to negotiate with the King of Navarre affairs of the highest political importance. It is true the poet represents to us the whole in a comic aspect, to suggest perhaps the idea that such is the character which matters of the highest moment would be sure to assume in the hands of women. Love is their world, and they always are or would be queens in it. After a few technical phrases, and barren references to public business, the princess and her ladies betake themselves with unmistakable delight to the established and immemorial policy of their sex, which is to secure to each of them a husband.

But, descending a little in the social scale, Shakespeare, it may be thought, would not attribute to women the skill to distinguish themselves in the more difficult walk of the professions. Instead of this we find that the most advanced Praxagoras of our day may appeal to Shakespeare as an advocate of their wildest claims. No abstruse or intricate problems of law, no recondite mystery in the science of medicine, lies beyond the reach of the female mind. Portia, in learning, acuteness, eloquence of pleading, and affluence of intellectual resources, surpasses all the jurisconsults in the Venetian courts; while in medicine, Helena undertakes a cure which all the physicians in France have declared to be impossible, and her mode of treatment is crowned with success. Well, then, has Shakespeare a mean opinion of women? Not at least in the department of mind, whether as to the ability to acquire knowledge, or in the far more difficult acquisition to know how to use it.

Aristophanes held with respect to women pretty

nearly the same opinions as Shakespeare. He concedes to them all manner of intellectual endowments, but insinuates that, in proportion to the strength of their faculties, they rise above the sphere of morals, and decide as loosely as the worst of their male neighbours on chastity and modesty. Yet it is not a little curious that not one of his women is practically incorrect in her conduct. Like Beatrice, the worst of them contents herself with talking immodestly; and, indeed, it has often been suggested by philosophical writers that the language of women is no key whatever to their ethical principles. Other dramatists of Shakespeare's time lay the scenes of their plays at home, but, excepting The Merry Wives of Windsor' and the historical plays, Shakespeare prefers dealing with the warmer women of the South, who are generally believed to be more daring in their amours than our countrywomen. Not that his studies had suggested to him any ethnological system, or that he knew much, except in the most superficial manner, of any nation except our own. It may be surmised that the women he loved, whoever they may have been, had light hair, generally golden, since he attributes this element of beauty to nearly all his heroines, wherever they may be found. Indeed, I remember no female character in the plays of any mark, except Mistress Ford and Rosaline in 'Romeo and Juliet,' who has black hair, and she is remarkable only for her coldness and insipidity. It is doubtless easy in these matters to build up conclusions on too slight a foundation, but it seems to me that Shakespeare associated in his mind moping and melancholy, or at least a tendency to airy speculations, with black hair, which is more consonant with experience than the theory of Goethe. This writer, whose notion is irreconcilable

with the teaching of history as well as with daily experience, maintains that, while dark men are full of vigour and energy, light hair and blue eyes are suggestive of a frail and flaccid constitution. He therefore imagines that Hamlet was fat and fair, since he was a Dane and descended from the Northmen. But were the Northmen, whatever may have been the colour of their eyes or hair, a flaccid and inactive race? Were they not, on the contrary, overboiling with energy, which precipitated 'them, like a lava torrent, upon the southern nations, and for ages made them the terror of the world?

But, whatever may be our determination on this point, there is no ground in Shakespeare for Goethe's fancy. In the first place, Hamlet is not a youth at all, but a fully developed man thirty years of age, and is only called young to distinguish him from his father, who is the older Hamlet. It does not, of course, necessarily follow that a dark-haired father must have a dark-haired son, but it is more probable than otherwise, and we certainly know that Hamlet's father had black hair. Actors would do well, therefore, to slight the suggestion of Goethe and adhere to dramatic tradition, which, in conformity with the teaching of physiology, makes dark hair the external indication of a meditative and melancholy mind. The most ancient of poets, either through philosophy or instinct, attributes to the fiercest, the bravest, and most energetic of his heroes grey eyes and yellow hair, together with all other elements of surpassing beauty, which it is surprising that Goethe should have forgotten.

I may allude here to another question connected with the idiosyncrasy of races: Does Shakespeare mean that we should take Othello for a negro?