starting for home and could stand it no longer, and then and there came off. down at one time or another. You suddenly one day we heard that he was come along with me this evening; I'm coming back much sooner than he exgoing to another meeting; I'm not go-pected. I believe he saw a steamer ing to speak to fine fal-lal folks, but to a set of good, honest working men, and you must try again.' And he spoke," said Mr. Bright in his downright way, "and I never heard a better speech in all my life; it was a capital speech, and they were all delighted with him." And then and there Mr. Bright told me another little anecdote of my father, whom he had met a short while before his death at the Reform Club. He said that as he was passing through the hall, he met him standing in his way and he stepped back, took off his hat, and stood with it in his outstretched hand. "What is that for?" said Mr. Bright. "Why do you hold your hat like that?" "Because I see the most consistent politician I know going by," said my father, "and I take off my hat to him." Then my father sailed for America, and people were very kind to us, and wrote to us with news of him. "Esmond" came for my grandmother, and a box which we received at Paris puzzled us very much, and delighted us no less than it puzzled us. It contained a magnificent iced cake, anonymously and carefully packed with strips of many-colored paper. It was not my father who had sent it, as we imagined, nor was it till long afterwards that we discovered that the sender was Mrs. Procter. Many things are remembered of her, but how many kind deeds there have been of hers without a name to them ! Once the letters began to arrive from America we were all much happier, for we seemed in touch with him once more, and to know what was happening. He was fairly well and in good spirits, and making friends and making money. I remember his writing home on one occasion and asking us to send him out a couple of new stomachs, so hospitable were his friends over the water, so numerous the dinners and suppers to which he was invited. When the long summer and winter were over and the still longer spring, I can still remember sitting with my grandparents, expecting his return. My sister and I sat on the red sofa in the little study, and shortly before the time we had calculated that he might arrive came a little ring at the frontdoor bell. My grandmother broke down; my sister and I rushed to the front door, only we were so afraid that it might not be he that we did not dare to open it, and there we stood until a second and much louder ringing brought us to our senses. "Why didn't you open the door?" said my father stepping in, looking well, broad, and upright, laughing. In a moment he had never been away at all. DR. JOHNSON, speaking of "Titus Andronicus," says, "All the editors and critics agree in supposing this play spurious. I see no reason for differing from them; for the color of the style is wholly different from that of the rest of the other plays." What the "color of the style" may mean I must leave to other critics to decide; but if continuity of sentiment and sympathy, of observation and tradition, of fact and fancy, of serious opinion and whim, of thought and word, upon every point connected with nature, has any tendency to prove and establish the common authorship of "Titus Andronicus" and, let me say, the " Merry Wives of Windsor," "Hamlet," or "Midsummer Night's Dream," why, then, Shakespeare was, surely, the writer of all four. There are two lines on which authorship may be disputed-namely, the absence of that tone of thought and of expressions that are familiar in the alleged author, or the presence of a tone of thought and of expressions of mistletoe! A play like "Cymbewhich are foreign to him. Upon which line" has not a reference to it. ice will the critics venture in the present case? Are there in the natural history of this play any peculiarities which might be quoted as evidence against Shakespeare's authorship? Yes, there are two; but even these very peculiarities themselves, considered with a full knowledge of the natural history of the whole of Shakespeare, will be seen to be the strongest evidence in favor of his having written the play. For instance, three times in a single act in this play the writer uses the word "panther." Titus invites the emperor "to hunt the panther ; " Marcus boasts to the emperor that he has dogs which "will rouse the proudest panther in the chase," and Aaron the Moor leads the emperor to the place where, he says, he " espied the panther fast asleep." That animal is never mentioned again in Shakespeare's plays. But, after all, this singularity of the panther in the play is not more curious than another in "Troilus and Cressida" (which is not doubted to be Shakespeare's) in which the elephant is mentioned three times and never again (except for an allusion to a pitfall in "Julius Cæsar ") in the whole of the plays. Yet if any one will glance over the bard's flora he will find that Shakespeare uses a great number of common plants only once, for instance, the holly, poppy, clover, brambles, lavender, and harebell, etc., and, most remarkable of all perhaps (and, in a hunter, such as Shakespeare undeniably was, quite inexplicable), fern. For it is a fact that, in spite of all the miles he must have ridden and walked through, the scores of deer he must have startled from the fern, the times innumerable he must have lain down to hide or rest in the fern, he only mentions the plant once, and then it is to refer to the fictitious properties of its seed. This neglect of the common country flora is distinctly characteristic of Shakespeare. Among other trees he only mentions the ash once (and then as the shaft of a Volscian spear!), the birch once, as furnishing "threatening twigs," the lime-tree once. Among others, he never mentions at all the walnut-tree, the larch, the fir, the chestnut, the alder, the poplar, or the beech. So that the play of "Titus Andronicus" remains without even the superficial evidence of any distinguishing peculiarities in its natural history. For the rest, the natural history throughout the play is so absolutely identical with that of all the other plays attributed to Shakespeare that if any one else wrote "Titus Andronicus" he must have been so soaked with Shakespeare that it oozed out of him at every point without his knowing it; he fairly dripped Shakespeare as he went, larding the earth with him. Or else, if any such man there was, he was Shakespeare's master. He wrote Now, the elephant was obviously a far more useful beast to Shakespeare, being more familiar and more abounding in suggestion and curiosity than the panther, which, after all, was only a variant of the "leopard," the "libbard," and the "pard," all of which Shakespeare uses. Yet Shakespeare, having once employed that striking beast the elephant, discards it forever. This was a way of his. So the critic may make nothing out of this appear-Titus Andronicus," and then Shakeance of a solitary panther in "Titus Andronicus." Nor can he make any more out of the other singularity of the playnamely, that it contains the one and only mention in all his works of the mistletoe "the baleful mistletoe." With all his woods, not a single bunch speare, with an industrious and humble fidelity to his classic that one would hardly have expected from his imperious genius, closely imitated the natural history of that play in every one of the rest. To begin with his quadrupeds. Titus Andronicus calls the empress Tamora 66 of tating Shakespeare would, like a Chinese tailor, reproduce on the new garment the patches and rents on the old one given him for a pattern? or that any one would, with deliberate industry, mimic the faults of the other's carelessness ? a heinous tiger;" and Lavinia, talk- | Again, from "Much Ado about Nothing to the empress in the presence of ing" (Act i., Scene 3), where we have her sons, calls them the "tiger's" bear, ape, and bird in a sentence : — young ones. Why did they not call DON JOHN: I am trusted with a muzzle, Tamora a tigress? Because Shake- enfranchised with a clog; therefore I have speare never uses that word throughout decreed not to sing in my cage. his works. He calls the female beast Is it easy to believe that any one imitiger," and its mate, when he wishes to specify it particularly, “a male tiger" (Coriolanus). So the Duke of York says that Queen Margaret (who is elsewhere a "bitch" and a "shewolf"), has a "tiger's heart, and Lear calls his daughters "tigers." Again, we have the expression, In "Titus Andronicus" there are "Rome is but a wilderness of tigers." three other references to lions, all of (Elsewhere he has "a wilderness of which are noteworthy. One is "the sea," and "a wilderness mon-mountain lioness, แ a phrase used by keys.") In "Timon of Athens" we Aaron to express his own intense have: "Athens has become a forest ferocity when roused, and illustrates of beasts." Which is Shakespeare? Shakespeare's partiality for the use of The bear-whelp's dam is with the lion mountain as an aggravating adjective. deeply still in league. His " "mountain snow is the coldest, I wonder if any critic ever thought this his "mountain" pines the hardiest, his passage "unworthy " of Shakespeare ?" mountain" cedars the loftiest, his Here we have a "tiger" (Tamora)" mountain" winds the fiercest, and who has a bear for her first husband his "mountain" goats the wildest. and a lion for her second. But it is All poets after him (and before him Shakespeare none the less, authentic for the matter of that) similarly sugand undeniable. In the same play, for gested an extra intensity by the prefix instance, Tamora warns her sons not "mountain." to let "the wasp "live after they have robbed it of "its honey ;" and Marcus, addressing a mob, says most absurdly : You sad-faced men, people and sons of Rome, By uproar severed, like a flight of fowl O, let me teach you how to knit again Another occurs in the following: now The lion moved with pity, etc., etc. Her life was beastlike, and devoid of pity. Here we have both sides of this question supported. And it is very curious disputed" play this favorite From other plays many, and equally that in a “ curious, examples of a fine "plurality indecision of Shakespeare's should be of metaphors may be quoted. For set forward in such neat antithesis. instance, in "All's Well that Ends In "Richard III.," again, we have it Well" (Act iii., Scene 6), fox, sprat, quite as compactly. On the one side : and bird are mixed: ANNE: No beast so fierce, but knows some touch of pity; on the other: 2nd LORD: We'll make you some sport with the fox, ere we case him. He was first smoked by the old Lord Lafeu. When his disguise and he is parted, tell me what a sprat you shall find him; which you will see this very night. 1st LORD: I must go look to my twigs; he shall be caught. CLARENCE: Not to relent is beastly. Demetrius threatens to leave Helena Helena retorts, "The wildest hath not such a heart as you." And from the other plays at least a score of opinions can be collected to favor either view, while in "Troilus and Cressida" they will be found combined, as it were, in a couplet: Brother, you have a vice of mercy in you, As a matter of fact, Shakespeare never made up his mind to his own satisfaction whether beasts had any pity or not, aud, accordingly, as it suited his present purpose, he made them either superior to man by the possession of an instinct of mercy, or inferior by its non-possession. Scattered up and down the plays will be found plenty of expressions to support either fancy, and in some, as in "Titus Andronicus," both sides are taken. Would so curious an ambiguity have suggested itself to a second person? Nor should it be overlooked that the lion which Lavinia especially instances as being, traditionally, credited with generosity hedid endure to have his princely paws pared all away" (ii. 3) is almost invariably in the other plays of Shakespeare treated in sympathy with that tradition of "the royal disposition of that beast" (As You Like It). The boar occurs as "the chafed boar." In "Taming of the Shrew" we have "boar chafed with sweat," and in Henry VI." will be found "chafed bull " ("Warwick rages like a chafed bull "), and in “ Henry VIII.," "chafed lion." The king has just gone by, and Wolsey, prescient of coming doom, says : He parted frowning from me as if ruin leap'd from his eyes so looks the chafed lion upon the daring huntsman that has galled him. The references to "domesticated" animals are all Shakespearean. The dog of the proverb is there and the dog of bear-baiting, and the "hell-hound " that we meet again in "Macbeth" and "Richard III.," and the "fell cur" (also in "Henry VI.") "of bloody kind" (Richard III.), and the "in human dog," a term of abuse that recurs in "Othello." This reminds me to say that the student will find the comparison of the two Moors, Aaron and Othello, a very interesting study. The lamb is mentioned in a passage that is a paraphrase of another in "Richard II.: " In war was never lion raged more fierce, In peace was never gentle lamb more mild. It runs : – When we all join in league, I am a lamb : but if you brave the Moor, The chafed boar, the mountain lioness, The ocean, swells not so as Aaron storms. This antithesis is a very favorite one of the poet's and is worth another word here for its reference to the ocean, for Shakespeare repeatedly uses the sea as exceeding the lion in its rage, as the superlative superlative of furiousness. There is only one allusion to the ass. "Now what a thing it is to be an ass!" says Aaron, aside of Chiron, an exclamation, I need hardly say, common in Shakespeare. mention : Cattle meet with AARON. The empress, the midwife, and | Page, when rehearsing the punishment of Sir John, says: yourself? Two may keep counsel, when the third's Go to the empress; tell her, this I said - to the spit. Nan Page, my daughter, and my little son, And three or four more of their growth, we'll dress Like urchins, ouphes, and fairies, to pinch the unclean knight; and Mrs. Ford adds: The utter callousness of the bloody And till he tell the truth Moor is brought out by this unexpected Let the supposed fairies pinch him sound. line with startling vividness. Not even his own vaunting confessions after- How could you dress children "like" wards, in which the very nadir of crime hedgehogs? and why should hedgeis sounded, can add to our sense of hogs "pinch"? Again, in the "Temthe villain's devilish indifference to pest," Prospero, punishing Caliban, others' sufferings after that "Weke! says: weke so cries the pig." urchins Shall, for that vast of night that they may All exercise on thee: thou shalt be pinched Another illustration of the continuity of the natural history of Shakespeare is afforded by the use of the word "urchins." Tamora, in order to enrage her sons against them, is charging La- Surely hedgehogs are not meant here? vinia and her husband with having And Caliban, soliloquizing over his made the most monstrous threats punishment, afterwards says: against her life and with employing enchantments for her torture: They told me, here, at dead time of the night, A thousand fiends, a thousand hissing snakes, Ten thousand swelling toads, as many urchins, His spirits hear me, nor pinch, Fright me with urchin shows, pitch me i' the mire Would make such fearful and confusèd note how this very soliloquy of Cali cries, As any mortal body, hearing it, Should straight fall mad, or else die sud denly. No sooner had they told this hellish tale, me here Unto the body of a dismal yew; Here we have "urchin " and "hedgeNow, in Shakespeare's day (as indeed hog " in one and the same passage, the at the present) the hedgehog1 was double meaning of urchin being so faknown as the urchin, but I do not miliar to his audience that Shakespeare think Shakespeare ever uses the sec-did not hesitate to use both names of ond name. He mentions the hedgehog the one animal in two senses in the four times as an animal, and as many one sentence. At any rate, no one times uses the word urchin, but each will suppose that Shakespeare meant time as a synonym for "goblin." In "hedgehog shows" when he said "urthe "Merry Wives of Windsor," Mrs. chin shows." So I see no reason whatever for supposing that when he used the word "urchin," for the fourth time, in "Titus Andronicus," he meant to convey a different meaning than on the 1 When Lady Anne calls Gloster a hedgehog, it may have been either from some association with his crest of a hog, or from its generally "obscene" and ill-omened reputation. |