the narrow court circle. Within these restricted limits, it certainly seems, at the first glance, as though the women had gained their cause and succeeded in their attempt to purify sentiment and soften the brutality of manners. But the truth, unhappily, is that there never was a period more utterly perverted and corrupt than this same sixteenth century, and that, too, in the very circles where the women were conducting their crusade.

The sixteenth century began with an outburst of sensualism, and ended in an outburst of violence, during which feminism went to utter shipwreck. The women could not, of course, have foreseen the religious wars; nor was it their fault that their fragile empire was submerged in blood. Yet the rough manner in which the men regained possession of the world's stage is not without its lesson. The arquebus had an eloquence of its own, after so much philosophism and dilettanteism and æstheticism. It had been lustily asserted that life ought, above all things, to be joyous; that nature is good, and we have but to yield ourselves to her attractions; and a certain number of distinguished and emancipated spirits had repaired to the Abbey of Thelema and erected themselves into an order under the rule of their own good pleasure. Events undertook to give them their answer; proving beyond a peradventure that human nature is savage at bottom, and that beauty is indeed "vain" to bridle its instincts.

The fact is that the principle on which the feminism of the Renaissance rested is fundamentally false. The women of that era wrought only for themselves, and their end and aim was the gratification of their own vanity. They reveled in the general concert of praise, and in the incense burned upon their altars by crowds of adorers. They were flattered when men made believe that they were ready to die for them, and to bless the hand that dealt the fatal blow. All their nice insight did not enable them to detect the essential element of falsity in homage of this description. In their energetic revolt from the time-honored teachings of religion, they declared the age to be ripe, and the moment come, for proclaiming an era for enjoyment. They did not know. that to seek pleasure systematically is the surest way to miss it. What madness indeed to regard happiness as the object of life! Since the life of man upon this earth began, who has ever attained it? And if it has escaped the most resolute search, eluded the most passionate pursuit, is not the reason plain that happiness does not exist? It is only an intellectual conception, an

illusion of our own sensibility, and the most chimerical of all. Those who have taken this chimera for the guide of their conduct have paid for their blunder by going furthest astray. They sought to attain happiness by loading life with the adornments of external elegance, only to find themselves fooled by appearances; the dupes of the merely accessory. The frame was gorgeous, but it was empty.

From the Revue des Deux Mondes. Translated for the Living Age. January

21st, 1899.

EDWARD DOWDEN

(1843-)

| DWARD DOWDEN, one of the best-informed and most apprecia tive Shakespearean critics of the nineteenth century, was born in Cork, Ireland, May 3d, 1843, and educated at Trinity College, Dublin, where he is now professor of English Literatures Among his published works are: "Poems"; "Shakespeare: His Mind and Art," 1872; "Southey," 1879; "Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley," 1886; "Studies in Literature," 1887; "Introduction to Shakespeare." 1897: and various "Literature Primers," which are models of compact and lucid statement.

IN

ENGLAND IN SHAKESPEARE'S YOUTH

THE closing years of the sixteenth century the life of England ran high. The revival of learning had enriched the national mind with a store of new ideas and images; the reformation of religion had been accomplished, and its fruits were now secure; three conspiracies against the Queen's life had recently been foiled, and her rival, the Queen of Scots, had perished on the scaffold; the huge attempt of Spain against the independence of England had been defeated by the gallantry of English seamen, aided by the winds of heaven. English adventurers were exploring untraveled lands and distant oceans; English citizens were growing in wealth and importance; the farmers made the soil give up twice its former yield; the nobility, however fierce their private feuds and rivalries might be, gathered around the Queen as their centre. It was felt that England was a power in the continent of Europe. Men were in a temper to think human life, with its action and its passions, a very important and interesting thing. They did not turn away from this world, and despise it in comparison with a heavenly country, as did many of the finest souls in the Middle Ages; they did not, like the writers of the age of Queen Anne, care only for "the town"; it was man they cared for, and the whole of manhood-its good and evil, its greatness and grotesqueness, its laughter and its tears.

When men cared thus about human life, their imagination craved living pictures and visions of it. They liked to represent to themselves men and women in all passionate and mirthful aspects and circumstances of life. Sculpture which the Greeks so loved would not have satisfied them, for it is too simple and too calm; music would not have been sufficient, for it is too purely an expression of feelings, and says too little about actions and events. The art which suited the temper of their imagination was the drama. In the drama they saw men and women, alive in action, in suffering, changing forever from mood to mood, from attitude to attitude; they saw these men and women solitary, conversing with their own hearts-in pairs and in groups, acting one upon another; in multitudes, swayed hither and thither by their leaders.

Complete.

THE

SHAKESPEARE'S DEER-STEALING

HE immediate cause of Shakespeare's departure from Stratford is thus told circumstantially by Rowe, his first biographer: "He had, by a misfortune common enough to young fellows, fallen into ill company; and amongst them some that made a frequent practice of deer-stealing engaged him more than once in robbing a park that belonged to Sir Thomas Lucy, of Charlecote, near Stratford. For this he was prosecuted by that gentleman, as he thought, somewhat too severely; and in order to revenge the ill usage, he made a ballad upon him. And though. this, probably the first essay of his poetry, be lost, yet it is said to have been so very bitter that it redoubled the prosecution against him to that degree that he was obliged to leave his business and family in Warwickshire for some time, and shelter himself in London." Some of the details of this story are undoubtedly incorrect, but there is good reason to believe that a foundation of truth underlies the tradition. Sir T. Lucy was an important person in the neighborhood - a member of parliament, one of the Puritan party (with which our dramatist could never have been in sympathy), and about the time of this alleged deer-stealing frolic was concerned in framing a bill in parliament for the preservation of game. Although he did not possess what is properly a park at Charlecote, he had deer; Shakespeare and his companions may have had a struggle with Sir T. Lucy's men. A

verse of the ballad ascribed to the young poacher has been traditionally handed down, and in it the writer puns upon the name Lucy-"O lowsie Lucy "-in a way sufficiently insulting. It is noteworthy that in the first scene of the "Merry Wives of Windsor," Justice Shallow is introduced as highly incensed against Sir John Falstaff, who has beaten his men, killed his deer, and broken open his lodge; the Shallows, like Shakespeare's old antagonist, have "luces" in their coat of arms, and the Welsh parson admirably misunderstands the word-"the dozen white louses do become an old coat well. It can hardly be doubted that when this scene was written Shakespeare had some grudge against the Lucy family, and in making them ridiculous before the Queen he may have had an amused sense that he was now obtaining a success for his boyish lampoon, little dreamed of when it was originally put into circulation among the good folk of Stratford.

Complete.

THE

ROMEO AND JULIET

HE story of the unhappy lovers of Verona, as a supposed historical occurrence, is referred to the year 1303; but no account of it exists of an earlier date than that of Luigi da Porto, about 1530. A tale in some respects similar is set forth in the "Ephesiaca " of Xenophon of Ephesus, a mediæval Greek romance writer; and one essentially the same, narrating the adventures of Mariotto and Gianozza of Siena, is found in a collection of tales by Masuccio of Salerno, 1476; but Da Porto first names Romeo and Giulietta, and makes them children of the rival Veronese houses. The story quickly acquired a European celebrity. Altering the name and some particulars, Adrian Sevin related it (about 1542) for his French patroness; Gherardo Boldiero turns it into verse for his readers at Venice. Bandello, partly recasting the narrative, recounts it once more in his Italian collection of novels, 1554; and five years later Pierre Boisteau, probably assisted by Belleforest, translates Bandello's Italian into French, and again recasts the story (1559). In three years more it touches English soil. Arthur Brooke in 1562 produced his long metrical version, founded upon Boisteau's novel; and a prose translation of Boisteau's "Histoire de Deux Amans," appeared in Paynter's "Palace of Pleasure," 1567. We have here reached Shakespeare's sources; Paynter, he probably consulted; in nearly all essentials