My prayers, worthless, are ascending,
But Thou, save me, gracious bending,
Lest I burn in fire unending.

With Thy lambs securely hide me,
From the goatlings far divide me,
On Thy right a place provide me.

When the damned shall stand confess-ed,
By the bitter flames distress-ed,
Call me then among the bless-ed.

Bowing humbly I implore Thee,
Broken-hearted,—deign'restore me,
When the end shall be before us.

Dreadful day of woe and weeping,
Lo ! from out the ashes creeping,
Guilty man to judgment driven.

Spare him then, Oh God of Heaven!
Clement Jesus Lord e'er blest!
Give to them eternal rest. Amen.

Rt. Rev. M. F. Howley, D. D.

St Johns, Newfoundland.

PATRIOTISM IN SHAKESPEARE

It was the author of King Lear who thus stripped off the lendings of this mortal state in which we find ourselves:

"We are not the first
Who with best meaning have incurred the worst"
And so,

"Come, let's away to prison:

we'll live,

And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh

At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues

Talk of court news; and we'll talk with them, too,—

Who loses and who wins, who's in, who's out;—

And take upon's the mystery of things,

As if we were God's spies; and we'll wear out

In a wall'd prison packs and sects of great ones

That ebb and flow by the moon."

What is this "but innocence or penitence crying out in this cruel -world; or yet the voice of those burdened out of all proportion, as we say, to their faults; were we to consider the world as a place for even-handed justice, and not

"This earthly world; where to do harm
Xs often laudable; to do good, sometime
A-ccovinted dangerous folly?"

Such Desdemona might have declared it, had she reflected, as much as felt, that poor "child to chiding," appealing to an Iago to win her lord again; or Arthur, appealing to one ready for murder, hy burning out that laving child's eyes,

"O, save me Hubert, save me! My eyes are out,
Even with the fierce looks of these bloody men.

"Give me the iron, I say, and bind him here.

"Alas, what need you be so boist'rous rough?
I will not struggle; I will stand stone-still.
For heaven's sake, Hubert, let me not be bound I
Kay, hear me, Hubert!—drive these men away,
And I will sit as quiet as a lamb;
I will not stir, nor wince, nor speak a word,
Nor look upon the iron augerly."

Foul deeds have been done!

Doth, then, the world go thus? ... Is this the justice that on earth we find?

No wonder if the introspective dramatist flies further within himself, and away from these things:

"Tired with all these, from these would I begone?"

"Tired with all these, for restful death I cry."

And his philosopher looks on, and notes what are the world's ways that lead to its success:

"Time hath .... a wallet at his back,
Wherein he puts alms for oblivion,
A great siz'd monster of ingratitudes;
Those scraps are good deeds past; which are devour'd
As fast as they are made, forgot as soon

As done: .

.... to have done is to hang

Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail

In monumental mockery. Take the distant ways:

For honor travels in a strait so narrow,

Where one but goes abreast; keep, then, the path;

For emulation hath a thousand sons

That one by one pursue; if you give way,

Or hedge aside from the direct forthright,

Like to an enter'd tide they all rush by

And leave you hindmost;

Or, like a gallant horse fall'n in first rank,

Lie there for pavement to the abject rear,

Overrun and trampled on

For time is like a fashionable host,

That slightly shakes his parting guest by the hand;

And with his arms outstretch'd as he would fly,

Grasps in the comer; welcome ever smiles,

And farewell goes out sighing. O, let not virtue seek

Remuneration for the thing it was;

For beauty, wit,

High birth, vigor of bone, desert in service,

Love, friendship, charity, are subjects all

Too envious and calumniating time.

One touch of nature makes the whole world kin,

That all, with one consent, praise new-born gawds,

Though they are made and moulded of things past,

And give to dust that is a little gilt

More praise than gilt o'er dusted. The present eye

Praises the present object."

What has all that to do with Shakespeare, and with patriotism? Much every way.

For where is the heart's allegiance due? And the mind's? Is it to the powers that be, that give us Cordelia dead in Lear's arms, or Lady Macduff's murdered son, or the boy Arthur,

"found . . . dead, and cast into the streets,
An empty casket, where the jewel of life
By some damn'd hand was robb'd and ta'en away,"

and that damned hand moved by the King de facto?

Ulysses sees things as they are; and how men, as well as Chaucer's women,

"They folwen al the favour of fortune."
"They follow all the favour of fortune."

And he will use this fickle world as it deserves, and be its master; will tell us to keep ourselves before it, or we shall be forgotten by it; and to bustle, and in it hide not virtues, or it will despise us.

And anotrier tVian Ulysses says,

"'TViere is a tide in the affairs of men "WYiicn, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune, Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries." However, wYio less fitted than Brutus to know well where the Vide is at tVie flood; who of those about him lived so in the ideal, -where Vie succeeded; though, in time, he failed:

"Thou seest the world, Volumnius, how it goes,
Our enemies have beat us to the pit."

This is "Brutus as Shakespeare presents him, beaten, and yet found lilce Brutus, like himself; he who sat high in all the peoples* hearts, whose excellence would make appear as gold the basest metal of those in faction with him, who slew his best friend for the love of Rome, and in a general honest good world have that friend almost pleased at being sacrificed: "He is a dreamer, let him pass," Caesar might have repeated when he was taking Ulysses' instant way to great success. Yet Brutus, as you know, is Shakespeare's hero. "Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more." We have no teaching in the play that this was wise or just for Rome. But Brutus could not fail, in that world in which he lived; and when dying declared,

"My heart doth joy that yet in all my life,
I found no man but he was true to me."

This is the figure Shakespeare's mind made the hero of a play called from Julius Caesar. Through this world Brutus moved sadly enough, "poor Brutus with himself at war." The kindred Hamlet—"so poor a man"—knowing he is in a time out of joint, thinking, too, that he is born to set it right, having, indeed, but the show of fire of Brutus, yet at last finds himself the executioner of the infamous King, but dying then in this act of revenge on the usurper. "There's such divinity doth hedge a king," even Claudius could say. And, as Ulysses judged they would, the people had followed even such a man as king, and such a giver of scandal. Yet "the general gender" loved Hamlet. They loved or revered Brutus, with the generosity that is in good-hearted human creatures, unsteady in mind, and helpless to combine. What can they, when influence, power, and passion, and interest play without upon them and within? Something, indeed, is rotten in the state of this world. So, after all, how lonely Hamlet is, how lonely Brutus.

The Lord Hamlet, the young Hamlet, the son of a loved father murdered, of a mother stained, whom he had trusted; loving, as I suppose he did, the poor girl Ophelia, who seems to have fooled him, herself being befooled. He is the soldier, scholar, courtier. But his heart is breaking; while Polonius is a meaner king-adviser than a Sir John Falstaff would have been, and must have gone to salute the rising morn; and that is the state of Denmark, and Hamlet walks there alone.

"How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!"

Often, Shakespeare lives thus in a mind, heart or soul, divided in purpose, wearied with the world, self-contained, or happily content—Hamlet, Prospero, the banished duke in Arden, Richard the Second even, and again Brutus; while states change rulers, and men's allegiance hangs doubtful, and all the outward show remains. Cassius is there so full of plans. Like a Jacobine he will make a new world, if only we are not "in awe of such a thing as I myself." But Brutus has not slept, "since Cassius first did whet me against Caesar."

The heart knoweth its own bitterness. In joy and in sorrow the truest man is in the world, not of it. Even in the happiness of a peaceful comedy, exile from the ways of the great world makes such a life exempt from public haunt

''More sweet
Than that of painted pomp."

The idealist is happy

"That can translate the stubbornness of fortune
Into so quiet and so sweet a style."

Private interest thus dominates over public. The dramatist whose work must needs be in the mind of man, yet here seems unable to treat the outward show as other than the half unreal stage over which we actors pass. For, it is not only when more free, but even when bound by historical tales, that the method of this poet historical—so far from that of an historiographer—shows the interest chiefly of a poet philosopher, whose patriotism is hardly in the bounds of space and time. Consider the Greek and Roman plays.