mass of muscles, the thick blood sluggishly moving along in the veins of these fighting men, oppress the intelligence, and leave no life but for animal passions. Ajax uses his fists, and devours meat; that is his existence; if he is jealous of Achilles, it is pretty much as a bull is jealous of his fellow. He permits himself to be restrained and led by Ulysses, without looking before him the grossest flattery decoys him. The Greeks have urged him to accept Hector's challenge. Behold him puffed up with pride, scorning to answer anyone, not knowing what he says or does. Thersites cries, "Goodmorrow, Ajax;" and he replies, "Thanks, Agamemnon." He has no further thought than to contemplate his enormous frame, and roll majestically his big stupid eyes. When the day of the fight has come, he strikes at Hector as on an anvil. After a good while they are separated. "I am not warm yet," says Ajax, "let us fight again." Cloten is less massive than this phlegmatic ox; but he is just as idiotic, just as vainglorious, just as coarse. The beautiful Imogen, urged by his insults and his scullion manners, tells him that his whole body is not worth as much as Posthumus' meanest garment. He is stung to the quick, repeats the word several times; he cannot shake off the idea, and runs at it again and again with his head down, like an angry ram :

"Cloten. 'His garment?' Now, the devil—

Imogen. To Dorothy my woman hie thee presently—

C. His garment?'. . . You have abused me: garment!'

Well." 2

'His meanest

I'll be revenged: 'His meanest garment!'

1 See Troilus and Cressida, ii. 3, the jesting manner in which the generals drive on this fierce brute.

2

Cymbeline, ii. 3.

On

He gets some of Posthumus' garments, and goes to Milford Haven, expecting to meet Imogen there. his way he mutters thus:

"With that suit upon my back, will I ravish her first kill him, and in her eyes; there shall she see my valour, which will then be a torment to her contempt. He on the ground, my speech of insultment ended on his dead body, and when my lust has dined,-which, as I say, to vex her I will execute in the clothes that she so praised,-to the court I'll knock her back, foot her home again.”

"1

Others again, are but babblers: for example, Polonius, the grave brainless counsellor; a great baby, not yet out of his "swathing clouts;" a solemn booby, who rains on men a shower of counsels, compliments, and maxims; a sort of court speaking-trumpet, useful in grand ceremonies, with the air of a thinker, but fit only to spout words. But the most complete of all these characters is that of the nurse in Romeo and Juliet, a gossip, loose in her talk, a regular kitchen oracle, smelling of the stew-pan and old boots, foolish, impudent, immoral, but otherwise a good creature, and affectionate to her nurse-child. Mark this disjointed and neverending gossip's babble:

“Nurse. 'Faith I can tell her age unto an hour.

Lady Capulet. She's not fourteen.

Nurse. Come Lammas-eve at night shall she be fourteen. Susan and she-God rest all Christian souls!—

Were of an age: well, Susan is with God;

She was too good for me: but, as I said,
Ou Lammas-eve at night shall she be fourteen;
That shall she, marry; I remember it well.

1 Cymbeline, iii, 5.

'Tis since the earthquake now eleven years;
And she was wean'd,—I never shall forget it,—
Of all the days of the year, upon that day:
For I had then laid wormwood to my dug,
Sitting in the sun under the dove-house wall
My lord and you were then at Mantua :-
Nay, I do bear a brain :—but, as I said,
When it did taste the wormwood on the nipple
Of my dug and felt it bitter, pretty fool,

To see it tetchy and fall out with the dug!

Shake, quoth the dove-house: 'twas no need, I trow,
To bid me trudge :

And since that time it is eleven years;

For then she could stand alone; nay, by the rood,
She could have run and waddled all about;

For even the day before, she broke her brow." 1

Then she tells an indecent anecdote, which she begins over again four times. She is silenced: what then? She has her anecdote in her head, and cannot cease repeating it and laughing to herself. Endless repetitions are the mind's first step. The vulgar do not pursue the straight line of reasoning and of the story; they repeat their steps, as it were merely marking time: struck with an image, they keep it for an hour before their eyes, and are never tired of it. If they do advance, they turn aside to a hundred subordinate ideas before they get at the phrase required. They allow themselves to be diverted by all the thoughts which come across them. This is what the nurse does; and when she brings Juliet news of her lover, she torments and wearies her, less from a wish to tease than from a habit of wandering from the point:

1 Romeo and Juliet, i. 3.

"Nurse. Jesu, what haste? can you not stay awhile? Do you not see that I am out of breath?

Juliet. How art thou out of breath, when thou hast breath To say to me that thou art out of breath? Is thy news good, or bad? answer to that Say either, and I'll stay the circumstance: Let me be satisfied: is't good or bad?

;

N. Well, you have made a simple choice; you know not how to choose a man: Romeo! no, not he though his face be better than any man's, yet his leg excels all men's; and for a hand and a foot, and a body, though they be not to be talked on, yet they are past compare: he is not the flower of courtesy, but, I'll warrant him, as gentle as a lamb. Go thy ways, wench; serve God. What, have you dined at home?

J. No, no: but all this did I know before.

What says he of our marriage? what of that?

N. Lord, how my head aches! what a head have I !

It beats as it would fall in twenty pieces.

My back o' t'other side,-O, my back, my back!
Beshrew your heart for sending me about,

To catch my death with jaunting up and down!
J. I' faith, I am sorry that thou art not well.

Sweet, sweet, sweet nurse, tell me, what says my love?

N. Your love says, like an honest gentleman, and a courteous, and a kind, and a handsome, and, I warrant, a virtuous, Where is your mother?" 1

It is never-ending. Her gabble is worse when she comes to announce to Juliet the death of her cousin and the banishment of Romeo. It is the shrill cry and chatter of an overgrown asthmatic magpie. She laments, confuses the names, spins roundabout sentences, ends by asking for aqua-vita. She curses Romeo, then brings him to Juliet's chamber. Next day Juliet is

1 Romeo and Juliet, ii. 5.

ordered to marry Earl Paris; Juliet throws herself into her nurse's arms, praying for comfort, advice, assistance. The other finds the true remedy: Marry Paris,

"O, he's a lovely gentleman!

Romeo's a dishclout to him: an eagle, madam,
Hath not so green, so quick, so fair an eye
As Paris hath. Beshrew my very heart,

I think you are happy in this second match,
For it excels your first."1

This cool immorality, these weather-cock arguments, this fashion of estimating love like a fishwoman, completes the portrait.

V.

The mechanical imagination produces Shakspeare's fool-characters: a quick venturesome dazzling, unquiet imagination, produces his men of wit. (Of wit there are many kinds. One, altogether French, which is but reason, a foe to paradox, scorner of folly, a sort of incisive common sense, having no occupation but to render truth amusing and evident, the most effective weapon with an intelligent and vain people: such was the wit of Voltaire and the drawing-rooms. The other,

that of improvisatores and artists, is a mere inventive rapture, paradoxical, unshackled, exuberant, a sort of self-entertainment, a phantasmagoria of images, flashes of wit, strange ideas, dazing and intoxicating, like the movement and illumination in a ball-room. Such is the wit of Mercutio, of the clowns, of Beatrice, Rosalind, and Benedick. They laugh, not from a sense of the ridiculous, but from the desire to laugh. You must 1 Romeo and Juliet, iii. 5.