I am the violet smells to him, as it doth to me; all his senses have but human conditions: his ceremonies laid by, in his nakedness he appears but man; and though his affections are higher mounted than ours, yet where they stoop, they stoop with the like wing."

Shakespeare has pleaded the cause of the ruled with no less candour than he has that of the rulers; and among his multitude of searching truths on either part, he hardly ever uttered one more subtle than this: "There have been many great men that have flattered the people, who ne'er loved them." And he has a notable axiom upon the folly of either courting or despising popular favour: "To seem to affect the malice and displeasure of the people is as bad as to flatter them for their love." Certainly he has but a minimum of honourable self-respect, or nobility of feeling, who would descend to flattery as a means of winning public approbation; at the same time, however, he is as insensible as impolitic who would pretend indifference to the opinion of his fellow men. As that illustrious Bishop Jeremy Taylor says finely: "It is not a vain noise when many men join their voices in the attestation or detestation of an action."

Shakespeare has glowingly vindicated the rights of free choice, of love, and of honest affection in his philosophy of marriage. Fenton's speech to Anne Page is a young lover's frank confession of mercenary views changed to disinterested attachment by the merit of its object; and it forms a pleasant acknowledgment of the better wealth that a man gains in a worthy girl whom he loves than in all the dowries and marriage portions that ever swayed fortune-hunter :—

I will confess (he says) thy father's wealth

Was the first motive that I wooed thee, Anne:

Yet, wooing thee, I find thee of more value

Than stamps in gold, or sums in sealéd bags;
And 'tis the very riches of thyself

That now I aim at.

Fenton afterwards maintains the claims of liberty and preference in wedlock, with spirit and justice. Having married his mistress, contrary to the several intentions of her parents-both father and mother having destined her to a different suitor, each unworthy of "Sweet Anne Page "-he pleads his own and his wife's cause for their stolen match in these sensible words :—

Hear the truth of it.

You would have married her most shamefully,
Where there was no proportion held in love.
The truth is, she and I, long since contracted,

X X 2

Are now so sure, that nothing can dissolve us.
And this deceit loses the name of craft,

Of disobedience, or unduteous title;

Since therein she doth evitate and shun

A thousand irreligious, cursed hours,

Which forced marriage would have brought upon her.

Elsewhere Shakespeare has declared with equal vehemence the unholiness of unwilling marriage in these words:

What is wedlock forcéd, but a hell,

An age of discord and continual strife?

Whereas, the contrary bringeth forth bliss,

And is a pattern of celestial peace.

He has entered his protest, too, against wedded union being made matter of bargain and sale; against money being made the object, and not the person beloved. He has never made a joke of moneymatching (like hordes of his successors to the present day) ; he never "vulgarised" anything; and, above all, never" vulgarised," or treated with a sneer, any principle; and, by doing so, tended to loosen the legislature of social harmony. He stigmatises that man as "abject, base, and poor, who chooses for wealth and not for perfect love;" and asserts the dignity of affection and plighted troth, in the

sentence:

Marriage is a matter of more worth
Than to be dealt in by attorneyship.

He has, in more than one instance, adverted to the beautiful doctrine which prevailed at the time he wrote-that a woman is perfected by marriage; and he, with his own noble largeness of philosophy and true spirit of just perception, extended this doctrine of human perfectioning by marriage to the man as well as to the woman. It is a doctrine that might well obtain Shakespeare's advocacy-poet and philosopher as he was-since it asserts the holiness and supremacy of love, as the most perfect and perfectioning essence in the universe.

Shakespeare's marital philosophy would, of a truth, be questionable, were we to take a delineation of Petruchio's character and conduct as a model of what he deems a husband's conduct should be. But he has there drawn an especial case, and one bearing in some measure upon the prevailing manners of former times. In those ages (so-called "patriarchal ") men trained their wives as they did their horses; they bullied and cowed [I don't mean a pun], they cowed and tamed them. And the example that the poet has deduced in Petruchio is a mild and even a refined version of the original

drama of "Taming of a Shrew." Shakespeare has redeemed Petruchio from natural obloquy by making him honestly confess that he comes to wed wealth. [What art, as well as good taste, in that redeeming clause to his rule of conduct!] He says:

I come to wive it wealthily in Padua ;

If wealthily, then happily in Padua.

Petruchio is no hypocrite. He does not assume one character before and another character after marriage. He did not deceive his wife. Katherine is not drawn a fool as well as a shrew. She knew her future husband, and thought she could rule him as she had done every one else; and she failed in her calculation, and was "ruled" and thoroughly "cowed." Shakespeare knew that money only would get off such a woman as Kate Minola.

Among the myriad of glorious things that our adored poet-with his own fervent heart and glowing imagination-has said upon love, it is difficult to select for illustration; but here are two fine earnest bits that deserve to be distinguished. Romeo, when he has scaled the garden wall that encloses his Juliet, tells her :

With love's light wings did I o'er perch these walls;

For stony limits cannot hold love out:

And what love can do, that dares love attempt.

And the second is, perhaps, finer, even in its generous plenitude of

devotion:

Love is not love

When it is mingled with respects, that stand

Aloof from the entire point.

Our pleasant friend Bottom, the weaver, has a pithy morsel upon this subject of love-sly, but with much of latent significance beneath its waggery. "To say the truth," he says, "Reason and Love keep little company together nowadays; the more the pity, that some honest neighbours will not make them friends."

The philosophy of love, in its too frequently thwarted course, is detailed at length in the famous and ever-quoted passage, beginning:

The course of true love never did run smooth.

And in that other couplet :

How much this spring of love resembleth

Th' uncertain glory of an April day;

Which now shows all the beauty of the sun;
And, by and bye, a cloud takes all away.

But the philosophy and poetry of love combined dwells in these superb but less generally quoted lines :—

Love, first learnéd in a lady's eyes,
Lives not alone immuréd in the brain;
But, with the motion of all elements,
Courses as swift as thought in every power;
And gives to every power a double power,
Above their functions and their offices.
It adds a precious seeing to the eye;
A lover's eyes will gaze an eagle blind;
A lover's ear will hear the lowest sound,
When the suspicious head of theft is stopp'd:
Love's feeling is more soft and sensible,

Than are the tender horns of cockled snails :
Love's tongue proves dainty Bacchus gross in taste.
For valour, is not love a Hercules,

Still climbing trees in the Hesperides?

Subtle as Sphinx, as sweet, and musical,

As bright Apollo's lute, strung with his hair :
And when Love speaks, the voice of all the gods
Makes heaven drowsy with the harmony.

Shakespeare strongly insists upon the doctrine of innate tendencies, inherent qualities, and sympathetic affinities. In his play of "Cymbeline," he has pointedly delineated the force of blood and kindred inclination, together with inborn disposition. The involuntary strength of preference that springs up between the unknown brothers and their sister-Guiderius and Arviragus towards Imogen, and in her towards them--is forcibly displayed. And the intrinsic royalty of nature in the too young seeming mountaineers is no less markedly wrought. Their supposed father, Bellarius, exclaims :—

O, thou Goddess,

Thou divine Nature, how thyself thou blazon'st
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 enchaf'd, as the rud'st wind,
That by the top doth take the mountain pine,
And make him stoop to the vale. 'Tis wonderful
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 sow'd.

In the character of Perdita in the "Winter's Tale," Shakespeare has more occultly, but no wit less emphatically, indicated his theory of

inherent qualities. Perdita, with all her modest youth and gentleness, has much of the dignity and self-possession, together with firmnessnot to say obstinacy-that characterises her mother, Queen Hermione. Her royalty of nature and grace is indicated in the remark :

This is the prettiest low-born lass that ever

Ran on the greensward; nothing she does or seems
But smacks of something greater than herself ;
Too noble for this place.

Her queenly mother's steadfastness of temper, with repose of manner, are more than once to be traced in Perdita's speech and conduct, while her personal likeness to Hermione is denoted by an exquisite touch that Shakespeare was sure to add upon such an occasion. When Leontes is looking upon his daughter, not knowing her for his own, as she stands there in her maiden youth and beauty, the faithful Paulina recalls him to himself with the half rebuke:

Sir, my liege,

Your eye hath too much youth in't: not a month

'Fore your queen died, she was more worth such gazes

Than what you look on now.

This brings to remembrance a parallel passage, equal in loveliness of poetic truth and natural truth, where a father is looking upon his child, not knowing her for such. It is where Pericles, gazing upon his daughter, Marina, has his belief in her worth confirmed by the living picture she presents to his soul of his lost wife Thaisa :

My dearest wife was like this maid, and such a one

My daughter might have been my queen's square brows;

Her stature to an inch; as wand-like straight,

As silver-voiced her eyes jewel-like,

And cas'd as richly: in pace another Juno,

Who starves the ears she feeds, and makes them hungry
The more she gives them speech.

:

And then, with affecting passion, he adds :—

Pr'ythee speak ;

Falseness cannot come from thee, for thou look'st

Modest as justice; and thou seem'st a palace
For the crown'd truth to dwell in. I'll believe thee,
And make my senses credit thy relation

To points that seem impossible; for thou look'st
Like one I lov'd indeed.

The glorious old poet Chaucer has a passage in his own simple beauty of style indicating the like creed of native sympathy in