It is where Lady Percy, Hotspur's wife, is telling him of his aspect during his broken rest at night. She says:

Thy spirit within thee hath been so at war;
And thus hath so bestirr'd thee in thy sleep,
That beads of sweat have stood upon thy brow,
Like bubbles in a late disturbéd stream:
And in thy face strange motions have appear'd;
Such as we see when men restrain their breath
On some great sudden haste.

Shakespeare's similes are a concentration of aptitude, with vigour in poetical imagery-in every sense "poetical," for they always elevate and dignify the object likened. Here is one of a warrior in battleactually sublime in its strength and truth:

As waves before

A vessel under sail, so men obey'd,

And fell below his stem.
His sword (Death's stamp)
Where it did mark, it took :-from face to foot.

He was a thing of blood, whose every motion
Was tim'd with dying cries.

His lighter and more volatile similes are no whit less sincere or strict to fact. Falstaff says: "There's no more valour in that Poins than in a wild duck;" and no creature, perhaps, is more easily scared, or with more difficulty approached. Here, again, is a capital flout at futile attempts to compass desperate undertakings: "You may as well go about to turn the sun to ice, with fanning in his face with a peacock's feather."

The instability and unreliability of mob-valour are thus exemplified :

He that trusts you,

When he should find you lions, finds you hares ;
Where foxes, geese. You are no surer, no,

Than is the coal upon the ice,

Or hailstone in the sun.

Shakespeare felt the force of this last image so strongly as to have used it again in another place. Falstaff, when he sends his vagabond followers packing, bids them "vanish like hailstones!"

Upon abstract themes, what noble philosophy has Shakespeare written! Upon time, for instance, and its despotism :

Time's the king of men:

He's both their parent, and he is their grave;

And gives them what he will, not what they crave.

But there is another sentence, on the same subject, that contains the

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concentrated spirit of Shakespearian philosophy-hope, and faith in good. It is but a single line; but it includes a world of firm and cheerful trust. It is this:

:

Time is the nurse and breeder of all good.

Our poet's advocacy of Divine right and human advantage, in royalty, has often been pointed out. He has some strong passages on the question; and as beautiful as strong. We should, however, bear in mind that the passages occur in the mouths of those characters who necessarily advocate the supremacy of royalty; and therefore that it is rather the fitness of the dramatist than the poet's individual opinion which is here manifested. Claudius, the usurping monarch in "Hamlet," says :—

There's such divinity doth hedge a king,
That treason can but peep to what it would.

And it is Richard II. who declares :

Not all the water in the rough, rude sea,

Can wash the balm from an anointed king.

While it is from the sycophant, Rosencrantz, that the following opinion is promulgated; which, nevertheless, contains much philosophic truth :

The cease of majesty

Dies not alone; but like a gulf, doth draw
What's near it, with it: it is a massy wheel,
Fix'd on the summit of the highest mount,
To whose spokes ten thousand lesser things
Are mortis'd and adjoin'd; which, when it falls,
Each small annexment, petty consequence,
Attends the boist'rous ruin. Never alone

Did the king sigh, but with a general groan.

In that metaphor of the gigantic wheel, and its potential effects in motion, lies a curious denotement of the principle of centrifugal force, as applied by our modern machinery. But upon the subject of royalty, Shakespeare has-in his own impartial way of viewing a question from all sides in which it may be dealt with-given another passage, which brings the infallibility and supremacy into greater latitude of consideration; reducing the person in whom royalty centres to be judged in his human capacity. It is where Henry V., disguised as a common soldier, visits his army by night; and falling in with three of the men who are debating the question of the morrow's expected battle, and expressing their opinion of their royal leader, returns them this answer: "I think the King is but a man, as

I am the violet smells to him, as it doth to me; all his senses have but human conditions: his ceremonies laid by, in his nakedness he appears but man; and though his affections are higher mounted than ours, yet where they stoop, they stoop with the like wing."

Shakespeare has pleaded the cause of the ruled with no less candour than he has that of the rulers; and among his multitude of searching truths on either part, he hardly ever uttered one more subtle than this: "There have been many great men that have flattered the people, who ne'er loved them." And he has a notable axiom upon the folly of either courting or despising popular favour: "To seem to affect the malice and displeasure of the people is as bad as to flatter them for their love." Certainly he has but a minimum of honourable self-respect, or nobility of feeling, who would descend to flattery as a means of winning public approbation; at the same time, however, he is as insensible as impolitic who would pretend indifference to the opinion of his fellow men. As that illustrious Bishop Jeremy Taylor says finely: "It is not a vain noise when many men join their voices in the attestation or detestation of an action."

Shakespeare has glowingly vindicated the rights of free choice, of love, and of honest affection in his philosophy of marriage. Fenton's speech to Anne Page is a young lover's frank confession of mercenary views changed to disinterested attachment by the merit of its object; and it forms a pleasant acknowledgment of the better wealth that a man gains in a worthy girl whom he loves than in all the dowries and marriage portions that ever swayed fortune-hunter :—

I will confess (he says) thy father's wealth

Was the first motive that I wooed thee, Anne:

Yet, wooing thee, I find thee of more value

Than stamps in gold, or sums in sealed bags;
And 'tis the very riches of thyself

That now I aim at.

Fenton afterwards maintains the claims of liberty and preference in wedlock, with spirit and justice. Having married his mistress, contrary to the several intentions of her parents-both father and mother having destined her to a different suitor, each unworthy of Sweet Anne Page "-he pleads his own and his wife's cause for their stolen match in these sensible words :—

Hear the truth of it.

You would have married her most shamefully,
Where there was no proportion held in love.
The truth is, she and I, long since contracted,

Are now so sure, that nothing can dissolve us.
And this deceit loses the name of craft,
Of disobedience, or unduteous title;

Since therein she doth evitate and shun

A thousand irreligious, curséd hours,

Which forced marriage would have brought upon her.

Elsewhere Shakespeare has declared with equal vehemence the unholiness of unwilling marriage in these words :

What is wedlock forcéd, but a hell,

An age of discord and continual strife?

Whereas, the contrary bringeth forth bliss,

And is a pattern of celestial peace.

He has entered his protest, too, against wedded union being made matter of bargain and sale; against money being made the object, and not the person beloved. He has never made a joke of moneymatching (like hordes of his successors to the present day); he never "vulgarised" anything; and, above all, never “vulgarised," or treated with a sneer, any principle; and, by doing so, tended to loosen the legislature of social harmony. He stigmatises that man as "abject, base, and poor, who chooses for wealth and not for perfect love;" and asserts the dignity of affection and plighted troth, in the

sentence:

Marriage is a matter of more worth
Than to be dealt in by attorneyship.

He has, in more than one instance, adverted to the beautiful doctrine which prevailed at the time he wrote-that a woman is perfected by marriage; and he, with his own noble largeness of philosophy and true spirit of just perception, extended this doctrine of human perfectioning by marriage to the man as well as to the woman. It is a doctrine that might well obtain Shakespeare's advocacy-poet and philosopher as he was-since it asserts the holiness and supremacy of love, as the most perfect and perfectioning essence in the universe.

Shakespeare's marital philosophy would, of a truth, be questionable, were we to take a delineation of Petruchio's character and conduct as a model of what he deems a husband's conduct should be. But he has there drawn an especial case, and one bearing in some measure upon the prevailing manners of former times. In those ages (so-called "patriarchal") men trained their wives as they did their horses; they bullied and cowed [I don't mean a pun], they cowed and tamed them. And the example that the poet has deduced in Petruchio is a mild and even a refined version of the original

drama of "Taming of a Shrew." Shakespeare has redeemed Petruchio from natural obloquy by making him honestly confess that he comes to wed wealth. [What art, as well as good taste, in that redeeming clause to his rule of conduct!] He says:

I come to wive it wealthily in Padua ;

If wealthily, then happily in Padua.

Petruchio is no hypocrite. He does not assume one character before and another character after marriage. He did not deceive his wife. Katherine is not drawn a fool as well as a shrew. She knew her future husband, and thought she could rule him as she had done every one else; and she failed in her calculation, and was "ruled" and thoroughly "cowed." Shakespeare knew that money only would get off such a woman as Kate Minola.

Among the myriad of glorious things that our adored poet-with his own fervent heart and glowing imagination-has said upon love, it is difficult to select for illustration; but here are two fine earnest bits that deserve to be distinguished. Romeo, when he has scaled

the garden wall that encloses his Juliet, tells her :

With love's light wings did I o'er perch these walls;

For stony limits cannot hold love out :

And what love can do, that dares love attempt.

And the second is, perhaps, finer, even in its generous plenitude of devotion:

:

Love is not love

When it is mingled with respects, that stand

Aloof from the entire point.

Our pleasant friend Bottom, the weaver, has a pithy morsel upon this subject of love-sly, but with much of latent significance beneath its waggery. "To say the truth," he says, "Reason and Love keep little company together nowadays; the more the pity, that some honest neighbours will not make them friends."

The philosophy of love, in its too frequently thwarted course, is detailed at length in the famous and ever-quoted passage, beginning :

The course of true love never did run smooth.

And in that other couplet :

How much this spring of love resembleth

Th' uncertain glory of an April day;

Which now shows all the beauty of the sun;
And, by and bye, a cloud takes all away.