5. Such is the fate of simple bard, On life's rough ocean luckless starred! Till billows rage, and gales blow hard 6. Such fate to suffering worth is given, To misery's brink, Till, wrenched of every stay but Heaven, 7. Even thou who mourn'st the daisy's fate, Till crushed beneath the furrow's weight The genius of Burns has awakened respect for homely worth in lowly life. He loves to sing of it, and his honest enthusiasm for it finds an echo in many a heart. CHAPTER XXVI.-MISCELLANEOUS. Shakspeare's Heroines. 1. Note broadly, in the outset, Shakspeare has no heroes; -he has only heroines. There is not one entirely heroic figure in all his plays, except the slight sketch of Henry the Fifth, exaggerated for the purposes of the stage; and the still slighter Valentine in the Two Gentlemen of Verona. In his labored and perfect plays you have no hero. Othello would have been one, if his simplicity had not been so great as to leave him the prey of every base practice around him; but he is the only example even approximating to the heroic type. 2. Coriolanus-Cæsar-Antony, stand in flawed strength, and fall by their vanities;-Hamlet is indolent, and drowsily speculative; Romeo an impatient boy; the Merchant of Venice languidly submissive to adverse fortune; Kent, in King Lear, is entirely noble at heart, but too rough and unpolished to be of true use at the critical time, and he sinks into the office of a servant only. Orlando, no less noble, is yet the despairing toy of chance, followed, comforted, saved, by Rosalind. Whereas there is hardly a play that has not a perfect woman in it, steadfast in grave hope and errorless purpose; Cordelia, Desdemona, Isabella, Hermione, Imogen, Queen Katherine, Perdita, Sylvia, Viola, Rosalind, Helena, and last, and perhaps loveliest, Virgilia, all are faultless; conceived in the highest heroic type of humanity. 3. Then observe, secondly,- The catastrophe of every play is caused always by the folly or fault of a man; the redemption, if there be any, is by the wisdom and virtue of a woman, and, failing that, there is none. The catastrophe of King Lear is owing to his own want of judgment, his impatient vanity, his misunderstanding of his children: the virtue of his one true daughter would have saved him from all the injuries of the others, unless he had cast her away from him as it is, she all but saves him. 4. Of Othello I need not trace the tale; nor the one weakness of his so mighty love; nor the inferiority of his perceptive intellect to that even of the second woman character in the play, the Emilia, who dies in wild testimony against his error:-"Oh, murderous coxcomb! What should such a fool do with so good a wife?" 5. In Romeo and Juliet, the wise and entirely brave stratagem of the wife is brought to ruinous issue by the reckless impatience of her husband. In Winter's Tale, and in Cymbeline, the happiness and existence of two princely households, lost through long years, and imperilled to the death by the folly and obstinacy of the husbands, are redeemed at last by the queenly patience and wisdom of the wives. In Measure for Measure, the injustice of the judges, and the corrupt cowardice of the brother, are opposed to the victorious truth and adamantine purity of a woman. In Coriolanus, the mother's counsel, acted upon in time, would have saved her son from all evil; his momentary forgetfulness of it is his ruin; her prayer at last granted, saves him—not, indeed, from death, but from the curse of living as the destroyer of his country. 6. And what shall I say of Julia, constant against the fickleness of a lover who is a mere wicked child?-of Helena, against the petulance and insult of a careless. youth? of the patience of Hero, the passion of Beatrice, and the calmly devoted wisdom of the "unlessoned girl," who appears among the helplessness, the blindness, and the vindictive passions of men, as a gentle angel, to save merely by her presence, and defeat the worst intensities of crime by her smile? 7. Observe, further, among all the principal figures in Shakspeare's plays, there is only one weak woman,Ophelia; and it is because she fails Hamlet at the critical moment, and is not, and cannot in her nature be, a guide to him when he needs her most, that all the bitter catastrophe follows. Finally, though there are three wicked women among the principal figures, Lady Macbeth, Regan, and Goneril, they are felt at once to be frightful exceptions to the ordinary laws of life; fatal in their influence also in proportion to the power for good which they have abandoned. 8. Such, in broad light, is Shakspeare's testimony to the position and character of women in human life. He represents them as infallibly faithful and wise counsellors, -incorruptibly just and pure examples,-strong always to sanctify, even when they cannot save.-From Ruskin's "Sesame and Lilies." CHAPTER XXVII.-SAMUEL ROGERS.-1763-1855. I.-Biographical. 1. Samuel Rogers was a polished, fastidious London gentleman of wealth. He was the son of a banker, and, on his mother's side, a relative of the Bible commentator, Matthew Henry. He was brought up to his father's business, and though he early retired from the management of the bank, he retained an interest in it during life. His first forty years were passed at the family residence at Newington Green, and the last fifty years he resided in St. James's Place, London, in a house famous for two things:-the refined taste with which it was furnished and adorned, and the excellent dinners given by its master to literary and artistic people. 2. The painter, Charles R. Leslie, thus depicts the man in describing his garniture:-"Rogers was the only man I have ever known who felt the beauties of art like an artist. He employed and always upheld Flaxman, Stothard, and Turner when they were little appreciated by their countrymen. The proof of his superior judgment is to be found. in the fact that there was nothing in his house that was not valuable. In most other collections, however fine, I have always seen something that betrayed a want of taste, -an indifferent picture, a copy passing for an original, or something vulgar in the way of ornament." 3. The writings of Rogers are such as might be expected a Flaxman was a sculptor of considerable repute; Stothard a painter who illustrated Boydell's Shakspeare and Rogers's Poems, etc.; while Turner became the most celebrated of all English painters. from a fastidious and rich bachelor, who passed his time in travel, in visiting picture-galleries and museums of art, and in giving delightful entertainments. For a period of fifty years scarcely a man of note, in the literary world, came to London without finding his way to Samuel Rogers's table. Rogers's prose works consist of Table-Talk and Reflections, volumes filled with elegant and chatty rehearsals of his observations among the distinguished men whose acquaintance he enjoyed. He wrote an Ode to Superstition when he was in his teens, and at twenty-nine he published the Pleasures of Memory, for which he is especially famous. To these he added, in later life, the Voyage of Columbus, Jacqueline, Human Life, and Italy. 4. None of Rogers's writings are marked by great originality or vigor. The tenor of his life was too prosperous and refined for the agitations of passion; but his poems are melodious, elaborate, and correct. His style is formed on Dryden and Gray, and he belongs to the school of Campbell, though he avoids his inverted epithets and artificial methods. He lived to see the romantic school of Scott, Moore, and Southey, and the reflective school of Wordsworth and Shelley, well established, but his works belong to a prior age. Lord Byron thought that the Pleasures of Memory, the Pleasures of Hope, and the Essay on Man were "the most beautiful didactic poems in our language." We give the following extract from 1. II. Pleasures of Memory." Twilight's soft dews steal o'er the village green, Stilled is the hum that through the hamlet broke, Where does the apos a What is apostrophized in this selection? trophe begin? What beautiful simile in verse 4? |