light upon the mystery; he points us to no reward of suffering in a future heaven; he opens up no bottomless pit for the punishment of sin after death. But he makes us hate sin with a perfect hatred; he shows us the evil of secret sins as well as of great crimes. The secret thought of sin, the momentary yielding to temptation, a touch of moral cowardice, in their measure may rank us on the side of the powers of darkness; or at least they may draw us into that moral twilight where we are caught up into the meshes of malicious vice; and even if we save our souls, we have to make atonement in the purgatorial fires of some great agony. That is one of the solemn lessons which Shakspere teaches. The hasty falsehood, the small theft, the secret deception, the lazy compliance, the enticing pleasure,—these insignificant details of our imperfect nature may bring us within the reach of some evil influence, which, if it do not destroy our souls, may work direful ruin, and plunge us into a dark despair from which we can only be delivered 'so as by fire.'

To keep ourselves from entanglement in the toils of the rulers of darkness we need the constant prayers: 'Search me, O God, and know my heart; try me, and know my thoughts, and see if there be any wicked way in me;' 'Cleanse Thou me from secret sins.'

IV.

THE WINTER'S TALE.

'And she is gone; sweet human love is gone!
'Tis only when they spring to heaven that angels
Reveal themselves to you; they sit all day
Beside you, and lie down at night by you,

Who care not for their presence-muse or sleep,
And all at once they leave you, and you know them!
We are so fooled, so cheated!'

ROBERT BROWNING.

or,

[The plot of this play was suggested by a tale of Greene's called Pandosto; the Triumph of Time. We have evidence that it was acted at the Globe Theatre on May 15th, 1611; it was probably written in the year 1610. The Winter's Tale belongs to Shakspere's Fourth

Period.]

HIS beautiful story may be divided into three parts,-
MISUNDERSTANDING, SEPARATION, REUNION.

TH

I. MISUNDERSTANDING.

THE misunderstanding is of a very different kind from that which we studied in Othello. Jealousy was a passion quite alien to the free and noble nature of the Moor; and in consequence, the conviction of Desdemona's unfaithfulness wrought like madness in his mind, and made his life unbearable. The deadly poison was dropped into Othello's soul by the malice of Iago; but in the case of King Leontes in The Winter's Tale there is a constitutional taint, a black

drop in the blood, which suddenly develops its venom and ferments into a fever of jealousy. We are told that our bodies are born with predisposition to a certain disease, which may be latent for years, but which, on occasion, will suddenly attack the life. So every soul is predisposed to a certain form of evil; there is an easily besetting sin, which only waits for the strong temptation to assail the citadel of the moral being. Pope tells us :

As man, perhaps, the moment of his breath,
Receives the lurking principle of death;

The young disease, that must subdue at length,

Grows with his growth, and strengthens with his strength;
So cast and mingled with his very frame,

The mind's disease, its ruling passion came.

That is what Shakspere teaches in this apparently sudden change of Leontes into a jealous husband and a treacherous friend. This is the sudden bursting forth of a long hidden taint of character. And we make the less excuse for Leontes because he should have known his wife, Hermione, too well to have thought her capable of crime. Othello scarcely knew his bride; their intercourse had been very brief; their married life had scarcely commenced before the dark suspicion was whispered in his ear. But Hermione had been the faithful wife of Leontes for years, and was the mother of his son; while Polixenes had been his intimate friend from earliest boyhood. Compared with Othello, Leontes appears a weak, superficial, suspicious, rash, and obstinate man. In his jealous passion we never feel one spark of sympathy with him; he appears utterly unworthy of his splendid queen; and it is only the depth of his penitence which at last touches our heart and moves our compassion. Leontes was one of those men who have only room in their minds for a single idea; and a single idea, unmodified by others, is always

t

false. The man of one idea is always absolute in his conclusions, infallible in his judgments, and furiously angry with every suggestion that he may possibly be mistaken. All the events of life are translated into the language of the one tyrannical thought; facts are used as the alphabet out of which to spell the hasty verdict and the cruel sentence. Leontes sees the courtesy and friendship of Hermione towards his old friend Polixenes. His knowledge both of wife and friend ought to have prevented one evil thought. But the latent disease in his constitution begins to operate; the jealous passion infects his nature, dominating every affection and impulse; within his narrow mind there is only room for the one over-mastering thought; love and friendship are for the time crushed out; to his jaundiced eye courtesy looks like licentiousness, and the freedom of mutual trust appears full evidence of crime. And when once the suspicion has seized him, he is helpless in its power. When the lurking fever spreads through the veins, no medicine can check its course; it must develop itself to a crisis, which shall end either in death or in recovery. The jealousy of Leontes becomes a point of honour with him. Against the calm denials of his wife and the entreaties of his friends he maintains his unworthy thought as though it were an article of religious faith. To the obliquity of his vision everything becomes twisted and deformed; to his violent prejudice the most spotless purity seems stained with sin. The whole conduct of this mistaken man is a commentary on the words of Solomon: Jealousy is cruel as the grave; and the coals thereof are coals of fire which hath a most vehement flame.'

In Macbeth we saw how an ambitious woman can work the ruin of the man she loves; but in The Winter's Tale we find Hermione becoming the providence of her husband, by her calm endurance and unwearied patience

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working out the salvation of his soul. I do not think that in all the writings of Shakspere there is a more finished creation than the character of Hermione. She may not

attract the notice of the general reader so much as the passionate Juliet, the sparkling Portia, or the magnificent Cleopatra; but to the careful student every word she speaks is a sacred thing, revealing the divine beauty of the soul of a perfect wife and mother. At first there is, perhaps, a statuesqueness' in the impression she makes upon us, a classical severity which seems to lack warmth and impulse. But as we become better acquainted with this majestic lady, we find that the apparent cold reserve is due to the depth and serenity of her nature. I hope my readers are familiar with one of Wordsworth's finest poems, called Laodamia; if so, they will remember the words:

The gods approve

The depth, and not the tumult of the soul.

I never read this touching story of Hermione without recalling those lines. In this gracious queen there is an infinite depth of patient love; amidst the storm of jealousy and head-strong fury which assails her, she maintains her serene and stately womanhood, as though she were a goddess looking down in pity on the wrath of men, never for a moment impatient with their rage or angry with their foolishness. She never speaks a shrill or hasty word; she never loses self-restraint in burning speech or hysterical passion.

At the commencement of the second act, we have that domestic picture of little Mamillius with his mother. Hermione is weary, and sends the child to play with her maids, whom he teases about the colour of their eyebrows and noses; after a while his mother calls him to her side again, and tries to keep him quiet by asking him to tell her