special dangers to savage races when first brought into contact with civilization, yet we might justify the usurpation of power by those who were mentally and morally the stronger, as long as that usurpation was only used to educate and humanize the savage.

If PROSPERO's Mediterranean home has the features of Bermuda, or of some West Indian coral islet, so we may say that MIRANDA'S heart may be compared to a Bermudian sea, transparent to any depth. She has no imitated, no artificial graces; as Mrs. Jameson well remarks, "We see the simple elements of womanhoodpity, tenderness, affection-standing in her, each with a distinct and peculiar grace." If ever Wordsworth's lines could be realised, it would be here in such a child of nature, reared in the solitude of the enchanted island

"She shall be sportive as the fawn,
That wild with glee across the lawn,
Or up the mountain springs;

And hers shall be the breathing balm,
And hers the silence and the calm
Of mute, insensate things.

"The floating clouds their state shall lend
To her; for her the willows bend;

Nor shall she fail to see,

E'en in the motions of the cloud,

Grace that shall mould the maiden's form

By silent sympathy.

"The stars of midnight shall be dear

To her; and she shall lean her ear

In many a secret place,

Where rivulets dance their wayward round,

And beauty born of murmuring sound,

Shall pass into her face."

We feel that ARIEL, the spirit of air, and her "wonder'd father," are the most appropriate beings to contrast with MIRANDA. Her contact with ARIEL in particular tends

to show by the contrast that she is a real human being, ethereal though she be. Mrs. Jameson remarks how skilfully the poet's art brings out MIRANDA'S ideal character by the effect she produces on others—

"Be sure the goddess on whom these airs attend!"

In fact, it is mainly "by the sympathy she both feels and inspires" that MIRANDA is bound to earth.

Homer and Shakespeare. Another poet had depicted a magical tempest with a shipwrecked prince cast upon an enchanted island, and there relieved and tended by the king's daughter. The pictures are both beautiful, but they are not the same, and their difference is as marked a feature in their beauty as their likeness.

If an uneducated person wished to understand the meaning of a poetical creation, or, in other words, to see in what the essential unity of a poem consisted, he could hardly do better than exchange the details in Homer's canvass,* piece by piece, for those in Shakespeare. He would then see what magic art there is in a poet's colouring, and how even the most trivial details are made to throw a reflected light on the main action of the piece; how, for instance, the attractiveness of the one island enhances the fidelity of Ulysses, while the barrenness of the other blackens the guilt of ANTONIO.

CALIBAN could not be transferred. He is a purely Celtic creation, the grotesque demonology which made such beings conceivable being wholly foreign to the sunny sportiveness of an Hellenic myth.

ARIEL'S song would not have been a fit vehicle for conveying sage advice to Ulysses in deadly peril, nor would stern-eyed Athene have ever won her liberty as a "felix in amoribus index," even the heavenly grace she sheds on her hero for the nonce being at once turned to the practical end of winning him a free passage to his home.

* Od. vi. 244, 275, 310.

If we fancy Ulysses taking the place of FERDINAND in the Tempest, it is obvious that it must have been a tale without an end, or have had the same end which poor Calypso found so sad. FERDINAND is fresh to the world; he "carries a brave form," unlike the toil-worn Ulysses; he has all his life before him, with no memories of long years passed with Penelope, of never-ending travels by land and sea, "of the towns and moods of many men ;" he is, in short, MIRANDA'S peer.

There is a real resemblance, on the other hand, between the characters of Nausicaa and MIRANDA. Each stands before us as an ideal of maidenhood, while the depths of tenderness in each is half revealed to us by their expressions of pity and sympathy.

Modesty is the jewel in the dower" of either, but the frankness of Homer's heroine has been tempered with a spice of worldly caution from the censoriousness she has met with in her courtly life; whereas MIRANDA, who, to use her own words, is "skilless of how features are abroad," soon reveals to FERDINAND that she "could not wish any companion in the world but him ". -a feeling that Nausicaa only confesses to her handmaidens, when Ulysses is sitting apart on the shore. In the same way she is eager to be FERDINAND'S surety with her father, while Nausicaa never pleads in Ulysses' favour, but tells him privately how he can best win her mother to his side. Yet, for all its unrivalled simplicity, MIRANDA's character marks the growth in the conception of woman's relation to society since the epic times. Nausicaa is no free agent, she may have preferences but she does not choose; with a quaker-like simplicity we see her preparing for her wedding with the suitor of her father's choice. Shakespeare required for his MIRANDA an amount of self-assertion which to Nausicaa would have seemed indecorous. It may be generally remarked that, feminine as Shakespeare's heroines are, he endows them with a force of will and independence of character that lifts them out of a position

in which the bent of their lives would be determined by an exaggerated regard to the requirements of others.

Homer could have drawn no such ruler as PROSPERO. For PROSPERO has the true kingly spirit, which governs for the good of the governed, all inferior as they are to himself; Alcinous, with his hearty good fellowship, is, compared to him, as the chieftain of a nomad tribe to the modern constitutional monarch.

Unity of Time. A striking structural difference between the Greek dramatists and Shakespeare is, that while unities of time and place are observed in the Greek plays, as well as the unity of action, this last is the only one of the three that we generally find in Shakespeare. The unity of time strictly means that the events represented shall not require much more time than is taken by the representation of the piece; and in the Tempest this is observed the whole action taking about four hours.

"PROS. What is the time o' day?

AR. Past the mid season.

PROS. At least two glasses. The time 'twixt six and now Must by us both be spent most preciously."

"PROS.

* * *

-Act i. 2, 240.

How's the day?

AR. On the sixth hour; at which time, my lord,
You said our work should cease."-Act v. I, 3.

"BOATS.

Our ship,—

Which, but three glasses since, we gave out split,-
Is tight, and yare,"
*.-Act v. I, 224.

The unity of place* requires that the scenes should not be at a greater distance than could be reached by the characters during the time of the representation. Here the whole action is between PROSPERO's cell and the seashore adjoining. If, as we suppose, the Winter's Tale

* See Shakespeare's Tempest, edited by Rev. J. M. Jephson. Macmillan. 1872.

belongs to the same period as the Tempest, the two plays form a curious contrast to each other in respect of all three unities. To jump from a daughter's birth to her marriage is a transition compared to which the passage from Sicily to Bohemia is as nothing. Shakespeare no doubt saw that the only limit is the power of imagination in the audience. As long as there is a real unity in the action of the piece, the imagination does not feel the difference between hours or months, still less does it measure geographical distances. Whether the imagination does not feel a hiatus in the Winter's Tale is a question with which we are not concerned here.