consideration, and a few Irish members wasted the time and patience of all parties by an interminable series of frivolous motions, but the House was in Committee of the Whole, and the Chairman of Ways and Means had consequently to suffer all the weariness and annoyance.

The Speaker in the Canadian House has at times to face a little difficulty which can never arise in the English Commons. It often occurs that he is not sufficiently conversant with the French language to interrupt a French member when he happens to infringe a point of order. In such a contingency he must depend on the translation of another member, who may not always catch the actual purport of the words, and it almost invariably results that a dispute arises and the Speaker is considerably perplexed how to decide. All motions, however, are translated at the table, for the French members have always clung with great tenacity to the use of their language in the official proceedings of the House. When the first Speaker of the Assembly of Lower Canada was proposed, in 1792, a question arose as to the necessity of a member knowing the two languages. The brother of Mr. J. A. Panet, who was then elected, expressed his opinion "that there is an absolute necessity that the Canadians, in the course of time, adopt the English language as the only means of dissipating the repugnance and suspicions which the differences of language would keep up between two peoples united by circumstances and obliged to live together," and in expectation" of the accomplishment of that happy revolution," he thought it "but de

that the Speaker on whom they might fix choice "be one who could express himself in English when he went to address the representative of the Sovereign." This Mr. Panet, it appears, could only speak a few words of English. The old journals record his speech to the Governor-General as follows: "I humbly pray your Excellency to consider that I cannot express myself but in the primitive language of my native country, and to accept the translation in English of what I have the honour to say. My incapacity being as evident as my zeal is ardent to see that so important a duty as the Speaker of the First Assembly of the Representatives of Lower Canada be fulfilled, I most respectfully implore the excuse and com

mand of your Excellency in the name of our Sovereign Lord the King." In those days the Governor-General delivered the speech to both Houses in English, and a translation thereof was read by the Speaker of the Legislative Council; and it was not till the time of Lord Elgin that the representative of the Crown read it in the two languages to the assembled Houses.

Whilst the Speaker is in the chair, his emblem of authority must always rest on the table in front of him. Most persons probably look upon the mace as a very unmeaning piece of metal, more ornamental than useful; but when we come to consider its uses, we find that it too has its significance like all other forms connected with parliamentary proceedings. It is a rule of the Commons that "when the mace lies upon the table, it is a House; when it is under the table, it is a Committee. When it is out of the House, no business can be done; when from the table, and upon the Sergeant's shoulders, the Speaker alone manages." Cromwell's contemptuous treatment of this ensign of authority is familiar to every one. Cromwell came into the House, according to Algernon Sydney, clad in plain black clothes, with gray worsted stockings, and sat down as he was used to do in an ordinary place. After a while he burst out into a tirade of abuse against the Parliament. Sir Peter Wentworth answered him, but Cromwell would not listen and called in the musqueteers who were outside awaiting his orders. Sir Henry Vane, observing this from his place, said aloud: "This is not honest, yea, it is against morality and common honesty." Then Cromwell "fell a-railing of him and cried with a loud voice: 'O, Sir Henry Vane, Sir Henry Vane, the Lord deliver me from Sir Henry Vane.' Then looking upon one of the members he said, there sits a drunkard ;' and giving much reviling language to others, he commanded the mace to be taken away, say ing, 'here, take away that fool's bauble.' But the mace of the Canadian Parliament has also had to undergo equal contumely, not, however, at the hands of a statesman, but of a mob during a very exciting episode of Canadian history. The inexcusable riots that occurred in the city of Montreal on the 25th April, 1849, will be still fresh in the recollection of many persons. The excitement against the Rebellion Losses Bill culminated on that day, when Lord Elgin came

down to the Council and formally assented to that measure. When the rioters broke into the Parliament Building, the House of Assembly was in Committee of the Whole on a Bill to amend the laws relative to the Courts of original civil jurisdiction in Lower Canada. We find the following entry in the Journals of the proceedings that broke up the Committee: "Mr. Johnson took the chair of the Committee, and after some time spent therein the proceedings of the Committee were interrupted by continued volleys of stones and other missiles thrown from the streets through the windows into the Legislative Assembly Hall, which caused the Committee to rise, and the members withdraw into the adjacent passages for safety, from whence Mr. Speaker and the other members were almost immediately compelled to retire and leave the building, which had been set fire to outside." When the members left the Chamber, a number of rioters entered and proceeded to destroy the desks and gas globes, while one of them ascended the Speaker's chair and mockingly dissolved the Parliament. The mace was then lying under the table and caught the eye of one of the rioters who took possession of it and proceeded to carry it out of the Chamber. The Sergeant-at-Arms witnessed this daring act from the doorway leading into the library, and attempted to wrest it from the fellow as he was passing out; but several other rioters came up to their comrade's assistance and the sergeant was forced to relinquish his hold of the crown, which was nearly torn off in the struggle. It appears, however, that the mace was returned on the next day to the officers of the House; for an account of the proceedings on the 26th April, in Bonsecours Market, informs us that it was then lying on one side of the hall. I have not been able to find any printed account of the way it was returned to the Speaker, but the generally received story is that some of the rioters sent it to Sir Allan McNab, who, whatever might be his sentiments as to the cause of the riot, was far too wily a politician to keep possession of so dangerous a witness, and

accordingly took prompt measures to have it returned to its proper custodians. One of the little beavers, which surround the mace, was wrested off by one of the rioters, and was afterwards seen in the possession of a person in Montreal who probably would have liked, had he dared, to hang it to his watch guard. The same mace still remains in the posses sion of the Commons of Canada, though it is said a demand was made for it by the late Mr. Sandfield Macdonald, when Premier of Ontario, on the ground that it had originally belonged to the Province of Upper Canada previous to the Union of 1840; but Mr. Macdonald was disappointed and obliged to order another on that economical scale which was in conformity with his ideas of carrying on the government. Consequently, whilst the mace of the Ontario Assembly appears to the eye as brilliant an ensign of authority as the mace of the House of Commons, it is intrinsically very much less valuable, as it is only made of some cheap material, whilst the other is all silver, richly gilded. The mace of the Commons always remains in the possession of the Speaker, and is kept in his chambers whilst the House is not sitting and during the recess. It accompanies him on all State occasions where the House is supposed to be present. It will be remembered that the House passed a resolution in 1873, to give a State funeral to the late Sir George Etienne Cartier, and that Mr. Speaker Cockburn, dressed in his official robes, and preceded by the Sergeant-at-Arms with the mace, had a prominent place in the cortege. Whenever the Speaker enters the House, the mace must be carried in front of him; at the hour of rising it is removed from the soft cushion on which it reposes and precedes him into his adjoining chambers. And now, in closing this paper, we may suppose that the proper motion for the adjournment has been made and carried, that the genial Sergeant has shouldered the gilded ensign of legislative power, and that the Speaker has followed him out of the House to seek that repose which he too often sadly needs.

J. G. BOURINOT.

PE

ERHAPS it may be asserted, without fear of contradiction, that more has been written about Hamlet, the luckless Prince of Denmark, than about any other of those immortal existences with which Shakspere's creative genius has peopled the world of imagination. Every earnest student of drama in life and literature puts a different interpretation on one phase or another of this enigmatical hero's character, and every year some new solution of its fascinating problems is offered to the public.

And either by the perfect skill of the great dramatist, or the subtle intuition of genius which seems to transcend art and better nature, but is in truth that supreme art which nature makes,* Ophelia, in this respect as in others, shares the lot of her mysterious lover. The timid, voiceless reticence veiling her inner life, which is the most stringent law of her being, and in which the true key to her character and conduct must be found, has puzzled the critics as much as Hamlet's dreamy speculations and indecisive utterand scarcely one has had sufficient insight to penetrate the delicate veil so subtly woven round her, and discern the pale beautiful hues, the soft opaline tints, the pearly lights and shades in which the great artist has painted this exquisite portrait of a most rare and lovely type of womanhood.

ances:

Still, in spite of all misapprehensions, this white rose of Denmark, while seldom if ever fitly appreciated, has generally had an irresistible attraction for all lovers of dramatic art, or art in any form. A list of the painters -English, French, and German-who have painted her in her pathetic madness or mournful death, would be a long one. The Death of Ophelia is one of Millais' early masterpieces, and the well-known French artist, M. Bertrand, has painted a picture on the same theme, which has been much admired. But of all the pictures her sad story has inspired, La Triste Rivage, the work of

Winter's Tale, Act 1v, Scene ii.

M. Hamon, another French painter, is the most fanciful and original in its motif, which represents her consoled by Love while with other parted spirits she waits for Charon's boat beside the doleful river. A crowd of disembodied souls, still wearing the semblance of earthly life, are grouped among the gloomy rocks and caverns through which the dark water glides. Princes in royal robes, poets crowned with laurel, young mothers clasping their babes, lovers whispering together, are there, and a shadowy form holding a branch of olive beckons them onward. Ophelia, clad in robes of gleaming white, lies beside the slumberous, leaden-hued river as if asleep and dreaming; her "honeycoloured hair" flows over her shoulders and breast; two maidens with burning lamps lie at her feet, while Eros with white dove-like wings hovers over her head, filling her dreamlike reverie with inspired promises of future bliss.+

"If thou marry," Hamlet says to Ophelia, 'I'll give thee this plague for thy dowry: be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny." Strangely enough his words have been fulfilled, for, though only the bride of Death, calumny has been her portion. Tieck, with a want of poetic insight curiously opposed to the romantic spiritualism his poetry assumed to represent, and equally at variance with the plainly implied meaning of Hamlet's words, "as chaste as ice, as pure as snow," supposed her to have been Hamlet's mistress; not in the high and pure sense attached to the title in the days of chivalry, but in that ignoble one into which it degenerated in a coarser age. nise the deep pathos which lies in the cruel contrast between her character and its surroundings, so finely and delicately worked out by the master mind which conceived, and the master hand which formed this matchless image of fair unhappy girlhood perishing innocently in her helpless grief and distraction, and feel the mute appeal of her † Athenæum, June 7th, 1873.

But all who recog

silent and suppressed anguish, more persuasive of pity to those who can comprehend its language than the most eloquent words, will thoroughly sympathise with that chivalrous English gentleman who sent a challenge to the German poet for having so foully slandered her fair and unpolluted innocence. Goethe, though he did not go quite so far as Tieck in misreading Shakspere, accused her of wishes and longings and proneness to dally with the mysteries of love incompatible with virgin modesty. Even Mr. Ruskin is so insensible to the sad, sweet pathos of her character that he reproaches her with being the weakest of all Shakspere's heroines, and lays upon her delicate head the heavy burden of Hamlet's failure.

True it is that the fair Ophelia is not a strong-minded woman in any sense, either noble or ignoble. She is no more a Portia than she is a Lady Macbeth. She belongs to that order of women to which Scott's Lucy Ashton belongs; gentle, undemonstra- | tive, timid, docile, with a depth of hidden feeling which she has no power of expressing, and a speechless tenacity of affection so persistent and clinging that it cannot be torn from the object round which it twines without injury to all the finer fibres of her being. Fitted for the loved and loving woman's place in happy domestic life, made for peace and tranquillity, not for tempest and strife, formed for submission, not for sway, she has no proud, impassioned self-assertion, no strength or energy of will to conquer opposing circumstances or combat fate. Wanting all those active elements of resistance and defiance which make the true tragic heroine, she becomes one only by being the helpless victim of a tragic destiny. And here again there is that subtle adaptation to Hamlet before alluded to. He is as little of a true hero as Ophelia of a heroine, and sinks beneath the burden too great for his strength which fate has imposed upon him the only difference is that the man struggles in the toils which he clearly sees, but is powerless to break through, while the woman yields | blindly as well as helplessly, unaware of the meshes fate and circumstance are weaving round her feet.

This "rose of May," this "kind sister," this "sweet Ophelia," is, as it appears, motherless and sisterless, the sole daughter and lady of the house. That she was tenderly loved by her father, the pompous

and politic old Polonius, and her brother, the gay and impetuous Laertes, we need not doubt; but their love was clearly of that selfish, unsympathetic, despotic kind, which inferior men generally bestow on the women under their control; a love which even in its most refined and tender form only prizes and protects those fair delicate flowers of humanity as sweet and lovely appendages to the larger and fuller lives of the men for whose solace and delight they were born, and with no other excuse for being. We see that Polonius and Laertes never for a moment conceive it possible that she can have any will or opinion contrary to or even independent of theirs, nor dream that, beneath her gentle reticence and that docile obedience with which timid and dutiful natures surrender all they most cherish to the claims of authority, hopes and wishes, altogether at variance with those they expect her to feel, may lie hidden.

Without mother, without sister, without any loving companion to cheer her solitude, the lonely girl sits "sewing in her closet,' working at her tapestry, or embroidering garments for her father, her brother, or herself after the fashion of her time, and while she plies her needle, weaving with her threads sweet or bitter fancies as the feeling of the moment prompts, and singing snatches of old songs, sad or joyous, according to her varying moods. Her chamber, where Laertes takes leave of her before he goes to France, and where Hamlet afterwards bids all the love he had felt for her a strangely passionate, though mute and fantastic farewell, we know to have been very unlike a modern lady's boudoir. A lady's bower in those days was simply the upper chamber of the house; we must therefore picture Ophelia's bower or closet, as the upper room of her father's roughly built log house, one of many similar rough dwellings inhabited by the courtiers and retainers of the chieftain or king, lying within the royal borg and protected by the royal fort or castle, which was also built of logs, and was at once the king's stronghold and palace. The floor of Ophelia's chamber is strewn with fresh tufts of pine or sprays of cedar, giving out a pleasant aromatic odour to the tread; the windows are open to the seabreezes except when closed by shutters to keep out the rain or snow, and the sharp winds force their way through many chinks

and crevices and wave the tapestry hangings which cover the log walls. There is little furniture, except the couch with its silken coverlet and embroidered cushions which served as a bed by night, a seat by day; a harp or lute, and an embroidery frame; one or two gold cups and silver-hilted knives; and the jewels and rich dresses in which so much of the wealth of those days consisted; to which we may, perhaps, add such pretty adornings as female taste and skill in that rude age could create from feathers and flowers and similar simple materials. It is amidst such surroundings, and not amidst a maze of mirrors and pictures and old china, we must imagine the fair Ophelia, seated at her embroidery, while the clash of arms, the words of martial command, and the shouts of the soldiers with their noisy wassails, mingle with the dashing of the waves on the wild and stormy steep of Elsinore. A pearl of the true and tender North, this sweet Ophelia is fair as the sea-foam, with sapphire blue eyes, and abundant tresses of pale, golden hair, with slender, delicate limbs, and small harmonious features, sweet, serene, and a little pensive, not sad. She wears a red silken kirtle and a mantle of blue, her girdle is embroidered with gold, and her shoes are clasped with the same precious metal; her fair hair falls in shining tresses to her waist, and is drawn back from her brow by a silken bandeau* wrought with gold and pearls, the badge of maidenhood worn of old by Northern maidens till marriage or the loss of virgin innocence forced them to lay it aside, to knot up their long tresses and cover them with coif or kerchief.

Even at Elsinore it is not always stormy, and on the day that Laertes goes to bid his sister farewell before setting out for France, the sky may have been blue and bright, the air soft and balmy, and the waves breaking with gentle ripples and placid murmurs on the gray steep rocks that met and stopped

their career. Sitting at her open casement, pausing now and then as

"She weaves the sleided silk

With fingers long, small, white as milk,"

to watch the happy sea-birds in their play, and half unconsciously drinking in the beauty and brightness in which all nature seemed to rejoice, she may have been thinking of love and happy lovers, of Hamlet and his passionate words hid in "her excellent white bosom," while before her dazzled fancy flit visions of bliss so vague and intangible that she dare not look at them long enough to give them shape or name, lest they should suddenly vanish.

But Laertes rudely wakes her from her day-dreams, and as he pours into her startled and bewildered ears terrible words of warning against Prince Hamlet and his love-songs, and she hears the cherished secrets of her heart, which she had scarcely dared to whisper to herself, much less to any other, dragged from their sanctuary and turned into a deformed and distorted travesty of the beautiful visions on which she had looked with timid joy as at a sacred mystery of wonder and delight, must she not have felt like the horror-stricken mother who sees a misshapen miserable changeling in the cradle instead of her beautiful and beloved darling, or that unhappy wretch who finds the fairy gifts in which he has been secretly exulting suddenly turned into dead and withered leaves? As if a canopy of cloud had suddenly darkened the heavens and turned day into night, we see her grow pale and shiver, as if with a presentiment of coming woe. Too much absorbed in the prospect of enjoying his liberty in France to pay much attention to such slight signs as betray emotion in Ophelia's restrained and reticent nature, Laertes, eager to be off, returns to his own affairs, and, as he bids her farewell, tells her to let him hear from her while he is away.

Do you doubt that?" she asks in her gentle, undemonstrative way. And then in her voice or manner seems to have forced something of suppressed pain and agitation. its way through Laertes's dull egotism and easy assumptions. Can it be possible, he asks himself, that she has been more moved by Hamlet's unmeaning gallantries than he had believed? and he delays his departure to repeat and enforce his previous warnings.