him against his will, and win him by a trick that would sicken Nym and Pistol. I must make him a perfect hound, of course, a mean, malignant liar. I must drag the excellent Florentine widow, and the maidenly Diana through the mud, what is life but mud? Ho, drawer, another firkin of your poor creature: I thirst! Then I must leave the peerless Helena in the arms of her moral poltroon, and add the cynical title, All's Well that Ends Well.' 'Well,' ha, ha! Nothing is well, William feels far from well ! ” [Drinks.

Accepting this little soliloquy, we can understand how the melancholy William, after the Dark Lady showed in her true colours, and Essex came to grief, and things in general went wrong, and there was something rotten in the state of England, wrote " All's Well that Ends Well," when, in fact, everything ended horribly ill, and the married Bertram gave Helena cause for anxiety, and probably took to drink, and beat her. These things were in Bertram's character. But we do not accept the soliloquy, or the idea that the piece is a pessimistic satire on human existence. Shakespeare had to turn out a comedy, in the way of business. He was lazy, and took up and revamped an old piece of his youth, a piece in which he was trysted with a perfectly impossible plot. He poured forth his genius on Helena; he created the old Countess (the best of women), he left the Clown as witless as he had always been; he left great boulders of his early rhymed scenes in the midst of his blank verse; all this just because Shakespeare was hurried, lazy, and did not He was a very human being, and never took him

care.

self with the portentous and admirable seriousness of the third-rate modern novelist. At least it is thus that I try to understand the man, not as the bitter mocker who wrote "All's Well that Ends Well" to be a satire on human excellence. We may look at it in that light, but nobody did so in the age either of Shakespeare or of Boccaccio. "Did she get him?" was all that Mr. Barrie's old Thrums lady asked to be told in a novel. Helena "got him," and all's well that ends well. The groundlings asked no more, but probably the play was never more popular than it deserved to be. Mr. Pepys saw "All's Lost by Lust," but he does not mention any performance of "All's Well that Ends Well."

As a comedy, the piece is saved by "the vile Parolles." Herr Brandes thinks that Parolles was invented and introduced to afford some excuse for the iniquity of Bertram, a boy deceived and trained by such a Mentor.

Though the Countess hints at this as an excuse for her son, more probably the stock figure of the braggart mercenary, who has haunted every camp, and speaks every tongue of Central and Southern Europe, was brought in merely for "comic relief," which the dull clown (no doubt very like a clown in real life), does not supply. We have many notable studies of cowardice. The poltroonery of Falstaff is but part of his humour: no doubt he had been a tall man of his hands. Eachan, in "The Fair Maid of Perth," is a coward because he has "drunk the milk of the white doe," and so drawn the curse into his blood. He knows and hates his own weakness; his temper is high, but his character does not back him; he is a tragic

coward, not a comic poltroon, and wins pity not laughter. A recent hero of modern romance in Mr. Mason's "The Four Feathers," is only a coward in conceit, afraid of being afraid; but, unlike Eachan, he conquers himself. Parolles, like Sir Andrew Aguecheek, is a comic coward; his imagination is all warlike and chivalresque; life is a burden under the dishonour of the lost drum: he dreams of military distinction as a child does, but has no more heart than a hare, and knows it. The cowardice sits well on Parolles, because he is all false together, whereas cowardice is tragical when it is the ineradicable fundamental sin of a nature otherwise noble. For evidence to character Parolles appeals to Captain Spurio of the regiment of the Spinii, "with his cicatrice, an emblem of war, here on his sinister cheek: it was this very sword entrenched it; say to him: I live, and observe his reports for me." They had begun to smoke" Parolles, before he had the happy idea of pretending to recover that regimental palladium, the lost drum. Perhaps he might beg, borrow, or steal a drum, "this or another." The marvel is that "he should know what he is, yet be what he is." But what would you have? Renown in war is the ideal of Parolles, it is creditable to him that he has an ideal and he has the strongest sense of humour. He remotely resembles the delightful Chevalier Burke, in Mr. Stevenson's "Master of Ballantrae." He can laugh himself out of most quandaries. Listeners to him, when he supposes himself in the hands of a barbaric enemy, hear no more good of themselves than the Duke heard from Lucio, or Poins from Falstaff. Parolles would ever

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be and move "under the influence of the most received star," the most fashionable of the hosts of heaven; but, alas, he "was created for men to breathe themselves on,' like the wooden soldan on whom poor Oliver Proudfoot, that honest Parolles of Perth, exercised his weapon. "Tongue, I must put you in a butter-woman's mouth, and buy myself another of Bajazet's mule, if you prattle me into these perils." Why Bajazet's mule? Probably the animal was admired for its reticence. Mr. Israel Gollancz suggests that perhaps Bajazet's' is a blunder on the part of Parolles for Balaam's."" But Balaam has no mule, an ass was Balaam's steed, and that ass "parle, et même il parle bien." It was a still tongue that Parolles needed to borrow. Parolles gets off easily: no poetic justice ever falls on Shakespeare's poor merry rogues. He is to his characters a forgiving creator: he made them so, and will not damn them for no fault of theirs. He would have shewn mercy to Mr. Squeers and Mr. Pecksniff.

"By foolery thrive,

There's place and means for every man alive,”

"If my heart

says the detected but optimistic Parolles. were great, 't would burst at this." Happily the heart of Parolles is not great, and he has a smiling future as a buffoon, like the clown, "a shrewd knave and an unhappy." Motley is Parolles's only safe and profitable wear, "a man whom fortune hath cruelly scratched." The tolerant Shakespeare forgives Bertram too, in the high tide of his false meanness, when Lafeu rejects him with, "Your reputation comes too short for my daugh

ter; you are no husband for her." But Bertram is good enough for the peerless Helena. So we end with [Flourish] "she has got him,"

"I'll love her dearly, ever, ever dearly."

Shakespeare's hack-work is finished, as heaven would have it, and we may believe that, the needs of the company satisfied, he never thought of his play again.

ANDREW LANG.