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was such a fool that any kind of rhyme would suit passionate parties who were playing "Jacks and straws" with each other.

Ferdinand, the King, opens up the play with a grand dash of thought:

"Let fame that all hunt after in their lives, Live registered upon our brazen tombs, And then grace us in the disgrace of death, When, spite of cormorant devouring time, The endeavor of this present breach may buy That honor, which shall bait his scythe's keen edge

To make us heirs of all eternity.”

Lord Biron, who imagines himself in love with the beautiful Rosaline, soliloquizes in this fashion:

"What? I! I love! I sue! I seek a wife!
A woman that is like a German clock,
Still a repairing; ever out of frame.
And never going aright, being a watch,
But being watched that it may still go right!
Is not Love a Hercules

Still climbing trees in the Hesperides?
Subtle as a sphinx; as sweet and musical
As bright Apollo's lute, strung with his hair
And when Love speaks, the voice of all the gods
Makes heaven drowsy with the harmony!"

Holofernes, the Latin pedagogue, criticising Armado, exclaims:

Novi hominem tanquam te. His humor is lofty, his discourse peremptory. He draweth out the

thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument.

And then Holofernes winds up the play with the Owl and Cuckoo song, a rambling verse, Winter speaking:

When icicles hang by the wall,

And Dick, the shepherd, blows his wail,
And Tom bears logs into the hall,
And milk comes frozen home in pail,
When blood is nipped and ways be foul,
When nightly sings the staring owl
To-who;

Tu-whit, to-who, a merry note
While greasy Joan doth scum the pot.

CHAPTER X.

QUEEN ELIZABETH. WAR.

SHAKSPERE IN IRE

LAND.

"Now all the youth of England are on fire
And silken dalliance in the wardrobe lies;
Now thrive the armorers, and honor's thought
Hangs solely in the breast of every man.

Cry 'Havoc,' and let slip the dogs of war!"

THE reign of Queen Elizabeth was a most glorious one for the material and mental progress of England, but most disastrous for Philip of Spain, Louis and Henry of France, Mary of Scotland, O'Neill, O'Brien, Desmond and Tyrone of Ireland.

The Reformation of Martin Luther, a Catholic priest, against the faith and financial exactions of the Pope of Rome, cracked from the Catholic sky like a clap of thunder from the noonday sun, and reverberated over the globe with startling detonation.

The cry of personal liberty and personal responsibility to God, went out from the German cloister like a roaring storm and echoed in thunder tones among the columned aisles of the Vatican.

Entrenched audacity and mental tyranny was

broken from its ancient pedestal, as if an earthquake had shivered the Roman dominions, leaving sacerdotal precedents and papal bulls in the backalley of bigotry and bloated ignorance.

People began to think and wonder how they had been bamboozled for centuries by a set of educated harlequins, who, in all lands and climes exhibited their antics and nostrums for the delectation and digestion of infatuated fools! Millions yet living!

Queen Elizabeth's elevation to the throne of England was a bid for the banished and persecuted Protestants to return from foreign lands and again pursue their puritanical philosophy.

Pope Paul demanded of Elizabeth that all the church lands, monasteries and cathedrals confiscated by her father, Henry the Eighth, be restored to the Roman hierarchy, and that she make confession and submission to the divine authority of the Catholic Church.

Although religion and civil law was in a very chaotic state, Queen Bess was not at all disturbed by the threats of the Vatican or the Armada of Spain. With old Lord Cecil as her prime counsel, she never hesitated to believe in her own destiny, and, like her opponents, the Jesuits, the end always justified the means. When it was necessary to rob

or kill anybody, the Queen did so without any compunction of conscience.

She did not care for religion one way or the other, and flattered the Catholic and Protestant lords alike, manipulating them for her personal and official advantage. Victory at any price. Business Bessy!

She professed great love for her sister, Mary Queen of Scots, but to foil the French Catholics and satisfy the Scotch and English Protestants, Lizzie cut off the head of her beautiful sister. She professed great sorrow after Mary's head was detached.

Essex and Raleigh, and many other royal courtiers were sent to the Tower and the block by this red-headed, snaggle-tooth she devil, who only thought of her own physical pleasures and official vanities, sacrificing everything to her tyrannical ambition. She died in an insane, frantic fit.

Yet, with all her devilish conduct, she pushed the material interest of Englishmen ahead for five hundred years, and by her patronage of sailors, warriors, poets and philosophers, gave British letters a boom that is felt to the present day, and through Shakspere's lofty lines, shall continue down the ages to tell mankind that nothing on earth is lasting but honest work and eternal truth.

Contention and war is the natural condition of mankind; for all animated nature, from birth to death, struggles for food and shelter.

The birds of the air, animals of the land and fishes of the sea, fight and devour each other for food, while man, the great robber and murderer of all, delights in destruction, and from his first appearance on earth to the present day, has been earnestly engaged in emigrating from land to land, seeking whom he may rob and kill for personal wealth and power! Doing it to-day more than ever.

Civilization is only refined barbarism; and this very hour the nations of the world are inventing and manufacturing powder, guns and terrible bat

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