More longing, wavering, sooner lost and worn,
Than women's are. . . . .

Then let thy love be younger than thyself,

Or thy affection cannot hold the bent;
For women are as roses, whose fair flower

Being once display'd, doth fall that very hour.

When the Duke dispraises men and praises women he is in one fit, out of which he jumps into another and says that women cannot feel so strong a passion and goes on thus:

as men,

They lack retention.

Alas, their love may be call'd appetite

which does not even rise to the level of passion. This idea is as absurd as the other, to which it is meant to be a parallel.

Viola suggests even in her male habit that she loves the Duke, who naturally misunderstands her. She then feigns the story of a sister,

She never told her love, etc.

After which she tells the Duke that women vow less, but love more than men.

Rosalind loves Orlando for his strength in wrestling. Celia says if he keeps his promises in love as he had exceeded them in wrestling, his mistress would be happy. Rosalind thinks so too, and calls him her child's father. The love throughout this play is peculiarly material, more so perhaps than in any other. Rosalind is thoroughly wanton, and yet chaste, though she scarcely knows how to keep her desires within bounds. Her disguise enables her to enjoy kissing and toying without stint, and she gives full rein to her inclinations.

Though the play is one of the most interesting in Shakespeare, it is one of the least modest, for every woman speaks out in the plainest language what she thinks, and Rosalind has accustomed the clown to use with her such unmeasured language that he is not to be restrained within the bounds of decency. Here Adonis should have been called in, and made to teach the poet the difference between love and gross passion, which is lost sight of throughout the play.

ESSAY X

PHILOSOPHY OF SHAKESPEARE: RELIGION-FATE

THOUGH Shakespeare be a philosophical poet, it is difficult to bring together such of his ideas and opinions as belong to philosophy, or indeed to ascertain what his philosophy is. One thing is clear enough—namely, that it is unsystematic-which is not so much owing to any obstacles presented by the nature of dramatic. composition as to the character of his mind, impatient of all shackles, but, above all perhaps, of the shackles of system. That there exists a deep basis of thought extending beneath the vast and varied surface of his writings, invisible generally, but in some parts rising, as it were, and exposing itself to view, is what no one will probably doubt; but I by no means entertain the belief that I have discovered all the elements of which that basis consists, or even that they are discoverable by any amount of investigation. Strictly speaking, there exists and can exist but one science-the science of nature-though for convenience we apply the term to many distinct and often very small sections of this all-grasping science, which must still in Shakespeare be regarded as one, for poetry, like the sun's light, considers itself privileged to flash at will round the whole of this pendent globe, to illuminate and reveal by its brilliancy everything it contains-good or beautiful.

Lucretius undertakes to write of all nature, both material and intellectual, and throws his glance with equal fearlessness over gods and men. Shakespeare, without professing to do so, yet does the same, though in a different way and perhaps in a different spirit, for so far as I can discern he is never impious nor presumptuous enough to judge dogmatically of what lies beyond the reach of his understanding. He has indeed

been accused of atheism by a writer who derives his arguments rather from what he does not find in the plays than from what he does. Had Shakespeare put forward any theory on this subject, it would probably have been that there is and can be no science of the unknown or theology, since all who have a due sense of our ignorance reverently abstain from professing any farther knowledge of God than that He exists. We may and do say 'God is Love,' but make by this no advance towards comprehending the divine nature, since we know as little what love thus contemplated is ⚫ as what God is. Yet it is by its participation in this unsearchable principle that Shakespeare's intellect is chiefly distinguished; he loves everything, from the inconceivable Author of his own being to the wild flower on the waste, the pebbly beds of streams, nay the very bog-fires that sport with the traveller by night. For the individuals of his own species, he has an inextinguishable tenderness, which, gushing forth everywhere in his works, constitutes their resistless charm. One of the Hebrew writers, attributing his own kindly nature to the Deity, says 'Whom he loveth, them he chasteneth'; and all pre-eminently great minds are often betrayed into the expression of anger against their species, by the weakness and ignorance through which it brings so much misery on itself.

Yet our ignorance of many things is no reproach to us, our minds being by their nature incapable of comprehending what existence, for example, is, what substance, what intellect, or how two beings can exist at the same time in one place, which is yet an indisputable truth, since wherever matter is, God is. The highest conception of the human mind appears to be, that God is a universal conscious intelligence, consequently that He is more profoundly conscious of our thoughts than we are ourselves. They spring indeed, so to speak, through His being into ours, and, though eternal in their essence, become phenomenal and fleeting in their forms by passing through our intellects. Shakespeare's mind was thickly peopled with these and such-like ideas; sometimes circumfused with doubt, sometimes flashing forth with innate splendour, as if fresh from the fountain of truth. He had imbibed, no one knows how or where, strange opinions respecting the visible universe, which had been put forward long before his time by some Eastern philosophers, and which, travelling with the sun, had taken up their residence in the mind of Paul of Tarsus; namely, that matter itself, together with everything finite, possesses but a show of being, and will ultimately be absorbed and lost in the Divine Nature, that God may be all in all :

The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,1
Leave not a rack behind.

1 This line occurs before the beginning of the passage, but for the sake of completeness I have introduced it here, instead of another, which every reader of Shakespeare will remember.