And Kate, when she is tamed, says—

"A woman mov'd is like a fountain troubled,
Muddy, ill-seeming, thick, bereft of beauty;
And while it is so, none so dry or thirsty
Will deign to sip, or touch one drop of it."

Adieu to thee, sweet Kate, and to thy mad-brain rudesby of a husband!

The next play is "The Merchant of Venice," one of Shakspeare's most perfect works-according to my opinion, and to Schlegel's-yet it is not until the 4th act that I find a passage to quote. Antonio is the speaker, and his illustrations are exactly adapted to his purpose; but Antonio, and therefore Shakspeare, could have made them without any personal observation of nature.

“I pray you, think you question with the Jew,
You may as well go stand upon the beach,
And bid the main flood bate his usual height;
You may as well use question with the wolf
Why he hath made the ewe bleat for the lamb;
You may as well forbid the mountain pines
To wag their high tops, and to make no noise
When they are fretted with the gusts of heaven;
You may as well do anything most hard,

As seek to soften that (than which what's harder ?)
His Jewish heart."

And then, in the course of the same conversation, Antonio adds

"I am a tainted wether of the flock,

Meetest for death; the weakest kind of fruit

Drops earliest to the ground, and so let me."

The three first lines of the delicious scene with which the 5th act commences, may be claimed as our property—

"The moon shines bright :-In such a night as this,
When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees,

And they did make no noise: in such a night

but of what happened in such a night I need not remind you. The beauty of the scene inspired one of the loftiest strains which are to be found, even in Shakspeare—

"How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!
Here will we sit, and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears; soft stillness, and the night,
Become the touches of sweet harmony.
Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold,

There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st
But in his motion like an angel sings,

Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins:
Such harmony is in immortal souls;
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay,
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it."

STANLEY. Thanks for reading us that passage, for it is one that can never be heard too often.

HARTLEY. Certainly, in the confined track along which I am running, I am not likely to come upon another equal to it; nor, indeed, do I remember one in Shakspeare, which surpasses it in sublimity, except it be in "The Tempest." "The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces," &c., will ever live as one of the noblest descriptions of this world's mutability. Omitting one or two illustrations of Portia's, which need not detain us, I turn to "Much Ado

About Nothing," in which I find a few minutely trifling allusions to nature, scarcely worth noting; and only one passage which I need quote. The words are Hero's, when she is carrying out Don Pedro's plot "to help her cousin to a good husband."

"Good Margaret run thee to the parlour;

There shalt thou find my cousin Beatrice
Proposing with the prince and Claudio;
Whisper her ear, and tell her, I and Ursula
Walk in the orchard, and our whole discourse
Is all of her; say, that thou overheard'st us;
And bid her steal into the pleached bower,
Where honeysuckles, ripen'd by the sun,
Forbid the sun to enter;-like favourites
Made proud by princes, that advance their pride
Against that power that bred it."

She then tells Ursula that their talk must be only of Benedict, and adds presently

"Now begin;

For look where Beatrice, like a lapwing, runs
Close by the ground, to hear our conference."

To which Ursula replies

"The pleasantest angling is to see the fish
Cut with her golden oars the silver stream,
And greedily devour the treacherous bait;
So angle we for Beatrice, who even now

Is couched in the woodbine coverture.

But Hero is not at all sure that the "false sweet bait will take, for she thinks that Beatrice is "too disdainful,"

and that "her spirits are as coy and wild as haggards of the rock." "The Merry Wives of Windsor,” albeit we are taken into Windsor Forest, deals wholly with human, and not with external nature. "Twelfth Night" contains at its commencement the sensuous image of the dreamy, luxurious duke, in which he compares a strain of music to

"The sweet south,

That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing, and giving odour;"

and then in the same breath exclaims :

'Away before me to sweet beds of flowers;
Love-thoughts lie rich, when canopied with bowers."

But this charming comedy has no other out-door fancies, and contains no rural touches. Very different in this respect is "As You Like it," the play that comes next in order in this edition of Shakspeare. To be in Arden is to be far away from every thought or work, every pastime or joy, that is not connected with forest depths and woodland glades, and the retired haunts of primeval nature. It is a play to be read in June, in some rural solitude, far from the smoke of houses, and the din of human voices. With a word or two, the banished duke carries us off with him into his sylvan domain :

"Now my co-mates and brothers in exile,

Hath not old custom made this life more sweet
Than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods
More free from peril than the envious court?

Here feel we but the penalty of Adam,

The season's difference;

And this our life, exempt from public haunt,

Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything."

And then comes that touch of pity for the "

poor dappled fools" destined to become venison for the exiled courtiers, one of whom describes the melancholy Jaques "weeping and commenting on the sobbing deer."

"To-day, my lord of Amiens and myself
Did steal behind him as he lay along

Under an oak, whose antique root peeps out
Upon the brook that brawls along this wood,
To the which place a poor sequester'd stag,
That from the hunter's aim had ta'en a hurt,
Did come to languish; and, indeed, my lord,
The wretched animal heav'd forth such groans,
That their discharge did stretch his leathern coat
Almost to bursting; and the big round tears
Cours'd one another down his innocent nose

In piteous chase; and thus the hairy fool,
Much marked of the melancholy Jaques,
Stood on the extremest verge of the swift brook,
Augmenting it with tears.”

Anon, Amiens sings that sweet song, out of which Jaques says he can "suck melancholy as a weazel sucks

"Under the greenwood tree
Who loves to lie with me,

And tune his merry note

Unto the sweet bird's throat,

Come hither, come hither, come hither;

Here shall he see

No enemy,

But winter and rough weather."