time had recourse to the same artifice to conceal the ravages of years or the parsimony of Nature.

When Burbage pronounced the following passage at the Blackfriars many a fair occupant of the foremost benches must have winced secretly while her female rivals tossed their own living fleece in triumph: Look on beauty,

And you shall see 'tis purchased by the weight;

Which therein works a miracle in nature,

Making them lightest that wear most of it:

So are those crisped snaky golden locks

Which make such wanton gambols with the wind,
Upon supposed fairness, often known

To be the dowry of a second head,

The skull that bred them in the sepulchre.

When Shakespeare wrote 'Romeo and Juliet,' the world appeared to him in all the gloss and splendour of beauty, as it is invariably painted by youth and hope; but care, study, and the drudgery of the stage stripped it gradually of these brilliant colours and made him long to escape from it that he might meditate on its deceit and hollowness in the quiet seclusion of Stratford :

O God! O God!

How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,

Seem to me all the uses of this world!

Fie on't! ah fie! 'tis an unweeded garden,

That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely.

Among the subjects on which men are most tolerant is that of morals, which, though always fluctuating and differing essentially in different countries, is yet commonly assumed to be everywhere the same, and to be placed under the guardianship of that internal judge, conscience. Here, more than in any other

department of philosophy, Shakespeare found it incumbent on him to cultivate an esoteric system. He did not and could not think as his neighbours thought -I mean such of his neighbours as were engaged in watching over other people's morals, however they might neglect their own. If we accept the doctrine that no two men either are or ever were exactly similar in all respects, physical and intellectual, it follows necessarily that their ethics, which are only the result of their idiosyncrasy, must differ in the same degree with the other attributes of their being.

Yet in all countries a pattern is set up by authority, in strict conformity with which everybody is expected to shape his conduct.

But when men agree to live together, whether in larger or smaller numbers, do the majority possess by nature the right to lay down absolute rules for coercing individuals in the matter of ethics, so that each of them shall only say and do what other persons find it convenient to say and do? What, in fact, are ethics? Are they not simply that aggregate of minor laws which human intelligence has established for promoting the happiness of individuals, both separately and collectively? Everything which renders a man happy as an individual and as a member of the community is good, and everything which has a contrary tendency is evil. If morals were placed on this basis, it would be found necessary in most cases to revolutionise society, since things indifferent in their nature are often pronounced wrong; while the name of virtue is sometimes bestowed on actions the tendency of which is to generate misery and suffering.

Society has in nothing exhibited so much caprice and ignorance as in its attempts to regulate the inter

course of the sexes, in which it has nearly always substituted violence for gentleness and instruction. Irregularities were punished in Shakespeare's time by causing the erring individual, if married and a female, to stand wrapped in a white sheet at a church door, for the edification of those undetected sinners who went in and out; and in other cases by being stripped half naked and scourged in the public streets. Harlots in high places were not, it will readily be believed, visited with this rough chastisement. Elizabeth multiplied her lovers with impunity; James's mother and wife, though equally lavish, were less fortunate in their amours; the great ladies of Elizabeth's and James's Court, from the Countess of Northumberland and Lady Rich down to the fair Bridges, practised the greatest licence with impunity; and it was only when they added murder to their other peccadilloes, as in the case of Lady Essex, that morality thought it necessary to avenge itself. Shakespeare, however, insinuates that adulteresses were as plentiful as blackberries, and puts into the mouth of Lear his reproof of those who punished them with brutality:

Thou rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand!

The mask of madness is here made to perform good service :

Lear. Thou hast seen a farmer's dog bark at a beggar?

Glo. Ay, sir.

Lear. And the creature run from the cur? There thou mightst behold the great image of authority: a dog's obeyed in office.

Some critics maintain that Shakespeare does not, like Beaumont and Fletcher, treat magistrates with contempt. I scarcely, however, know a passage in any dramatist that bears upon them more roughly

than the following, which may, moreover, be paralleled with many others:

See how yond justice rails upon yond simple thief. Hark, in thine ear: change places; and, handy-dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief?

The old king, however, does not stop here; he looks around him, and finds something to say of other classes of men:

The usurer hangs the cozener.

Through tatter'd clothes small vices do appear;

Robes and furr'd gowns hide all. Plate sin with gold,
And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks;

Arm it in rags, a pigmy's straw does pierce it.

From the passages conceived in King Cambyses' vein, found here and there in the plays, especially in 'Coriolanus,' it might be inferred that Shakespeare imagined human society to be disposed like rocks on the surface of the globe-in strata with the brightest and most beautiful uppermost. Very different were his real convictions. If he had his prejudices on this subject, they were rather in favour of the lowly than the high, since you often find in his serving women and men, in his dependants and his fools, more real faith and fidelity than in his princes and grandees. In As You Like It' the very soul of gratitude and affection is found in old Adam, and if the young noble repays it, his virtue is only the reflection of his servant's. In Timon' whatever beauty or moral grace there is breaks forth through the awkwardness and disadvantages of the humbler classes, while the opulent and the great exhibit no qualities but those of baseness and ingratitude. Not that Shakespeare had deluded himself into the belief that pure and excellent qualities flourish exclusively in any rank of society, or

that poverty is the only nurse of virtue; but experience had taught him that

Adversity,

[Though], like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head.

In fact, one of the first among the lessons of philosophy, to whatever source we may trace the instruction, is that the human soul never acquires its greatest strength and beauty till it has been chastened and disciplined by suffering. Of this truth Greek tragedy is full, and Shakespeare, who in this respect thought as Eschylus thought, abounds with evidences of the same conviction. In 'Richard the Second' and 'Henry the Fourth' he concentrates in comparatively few scenes the essence of all the teaching of history, namely, that they who are elated and insolent in prosperity are in the same proportion base and abject when prostrated by sickness and calamity.

But the truth, which neither experience nor literature nor philosophy will ever cause to be generally accepted, though in theory it was accepted by Shakespeare, is that all the misery of civil society springs from the worship of power and grandeur by the multitude. In this consists the original sin of human nature, compounded of meanness, weakness, and conscious baseness. Hence the predominance of rank over worth, of authority over virtue. If Shakespeare's opinions were universally prevalent, what havoc would they not create in the world! It may be all very well to hear him lecture on set occasions by the mouth of Ulysses or others on the benefits of order, when we find from numerous incidental expressions with what scorn he internally regarded it:

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