and pity for a woman steeped in guilt. When he approached the end of his play Shakespeare began to be uneasy lest the world should imagine that he really believed in fairies; so, when he had made such use of them as he thought proper, he chose Theseus for his delegate to express his real opinion:

I never may believe

These antique fables, nor these fairy toys.

Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend

More than cool reason ever comprehends.

Shakespeare was full of animal spirits before they had been deadened by the consciousness of those harmful deeds lamented in a sonnet when he wrote 'Love's Labour's Lost '-a comedy brimming over with wit and humour, often, however, neutralised by conceits and outrageous improbabilities. Not an antagonistic idea presents itself throughout the play to disturb the full current of vivacity. All is drollery, mirth, laughter, and sportive trifling, from the pedantic vanity of the King and his nobles down to the ludicrous vaunting of the Spanish cavalier, who is gored by the horns of Moth's wit.

There are here no marked characters, but the rudiments of many that make their appearance afterwards in more highly finished plays: Rosaline is Beatrice, as yet in fancy's cradle, and Biron under the same conditions is Benedick. The four lovers, however, and the four ladies are all cast pretty nearly in the same mould, and may be looked upon rather as materials for future use than as perfectly wrought out figures; the lower personages supply most amusement, as Costard, Holofernes, Armado, Moth and Jaquenetta. Shakespeare was busily engaged in his studies when

he wrote this play, and it may be inferred from many parts of it that he had shadowed forth in his mind a vast scheme of study, into which, as into a grand mould, his multitudinous and exuberant thoughts afterwards ran. It may be well for his ethical fame that he kept no diary and wrote no confessions, but in many ways it is an incalculable loss to us, since had he been frank we should then have been led into the workshop of the most original and prolific intellect of modern times.

In the early part of his life he found it impossible to restrain his fiery imagination within almost any limits. His greatest tragedy is thickly sown with comic scenes so thickly indeed that we may be at times in doubt whether we are engaged with a tragedy or a comedy-but when, through the bright sky of wit, humour, and gaiety overhung with the gorgeous clouds and filled with the incense of beauty, the dark vapours of tragedy break in upon the scene, our emotions are rendered only the deeper and more sombre for the brilliance out of which we pass into the gloom. Up to the death of Mercutio the mind scarcely catches a glimpse of a single image akin to suffering or terror; everything is covered with an atmosphere of sunshine and splendour, perfumed with the voluptuous breath of love, intermingled with ideas in swarms and flashes, which sometimes hurry the mind beyond its legitimate limits. Mercutio is incomparably the most comic character in Shakespeare; the fire of youth constantly keeping up his blood at boiling heat, he is unable to restrain himself within the bounds of decency, so that his imagination is constantly giving birth to wild combinations of ideas and sexual imagery. He may be regarded as the incarnation of comedy in its

Aristophanic form, and the all but impossibility of supplying him with a constant succession of jests, pleasantries, ideas, and images suited to his antecedents makes Shakespeare kill him, as Dryden expresses it, since he would otherwise have killed Shakespeare.

Crabb Robinson relates an anecdote apropos of another character in Romeo and Juliet': Coleridge, he says, delivering a lecture on the character of the Nurse, became so discursive and garrulous that Lamb whispered sarcastically 'It is after the manner of the Nurse.' Several critics, German and English, take in my opinion a strange view of this character, which seems to me rather a blot than a beauty in the play. No great sagacity is needed to perceive that it is unnatural only eleven years have elapsed since she weaned Juliet; by her own account of her infirmities she must be hard upon seventy, so that she must have suckled her foster child till near threescore, which is palpably absurd. It may be funny to represent on the stage the weaknesses and follies of age, but then the poet should select conditions in which his picture would be reconcilable with nature, which it obviously is not in the present case. Juliet's mother is quite a young woman, and would doubtless choose for her first-born a nurse not older, but rather younger, than herself, by which reckoning the comic old lady with four teeth, and hobbling about as if on the brink of the grave, would not be above five or six and twenty.

At any rate, the nurse as she is found in the play is simply an impossibility, and cannot therefore be referred to as a proof of Shakespeare's judgment. She is certainly made to say droll things and to elicit still droller things from the unbridled tongue of Mercutio; but she should have been introduced as nurse to Juliet's

mother, at least, if not to her father. I may here notice another slip of the poet. Having been at the pains to inform us that Juliet's mother is only twentyeight, he loses sight of his own chronology and makes her exclaim:

O me! this sight of death is as a bell,
That warns my old age to a sepulchre.

If a jury of ladies under thirty were asked to give their verdict on such a representation of woman's life, I think Shakespeare's truth to nature, in this instance at least, would scarcely be allowed. As to Capulet himself, there is no reason to doubt that he is old, though not so decrepit as to require a crutch, which when he calls for his sword his wife recommends to him. However, there is one trait in his character which certainly smacks of dotage: that is his failing to remember whether he has had but one child or many children, for in one place he tells us that God has sent him Juliet only, while in another place he speaks of her as the only one left to him out of several :

Wife, we scarce thought us blest

That God had lent us but this only child.

Act iii. sc. v.

But in Act i. sc. ii. he clearly alludes to his having had other children:

The earth hath swallow'd all my hopes but she. At any rate, whatever may have been the number of his children, Juliet must be assumed to have been the first, since he married Lady Capulet when she was thirteen, who became Juliet's mother at fourteen. These, it may be said, are trifles, but life is made up in a measure of trifles, which therefore ought not to be overlooked in a picture of life.

ESSAY VI

LICENCE IN THE USE OF LANGUAGE

SHAKESPEARE has often been thought to aim at giving a complete picture of human life, of birth and death, of conception and dissolution, and of all the circumstances and incidents which connect themselves with the vital principle in its progress from the beginning to the end. The ethical theories prevalent in his time, though less cramped than those to which we pay allegiance, obstructed his design, though not so completely but that he has, with more or less clearness, suggested, if he has not described, most of the processes from the consideration of which prejudice and ignorance recoil.

No one as yet knows what man is, how he begins to be or how he ends, what is the object of his existence—that is, what purpose he serves in the creation, what relations he bears to other finite existences, and what to the cause of all existence. What may perhaps be called the poles of speculation, the infinitely great and the infinitely minute, overawe the mind almost equally, for thought is startled and retreats when it attempts to penetrate the fathomless abysses of space, and scarcely if at all less so when it throws its glances on the internal mechanism of man's nature, on the involution of mind in matter, on the germs of being,