there. In 1598 he was asking for the post of keeper of the Queen's bears and mastiffs, saying "it is better to be a bear-herd than to be baited daily with great exclamations for small debts." He published in 1597 a metrical paraphrase of Ecclesiasticus, and two hundred Sonnets of Christian Passions, some of which had appeared before, in 1593. Thomas Hudson was in the service of James VI. of Scotland. He published at Edinburgh, in 1584, a translation of the "Judith" of Du Bartas, and contributed in 1585 a sonnet to King James's "Essayes of a Prentise in the Divine Arte of Poesie."

Then say the young Cambridge critics, who did scant justice to Lok and Hudson

"Drayton's sweet muse is like a sanguine dye
Able to ravish the rash gazer's eye."

"However, he wants one true note of a Poet of our times, and that is this, he cannot swagger it well in a tavern, nor domineer in a pothouse." This corroborates the record we have had already from Francis Meres, who wrote, as a personal friend, of Drayton's pure and honourable character. Marston is satirized as Monsieur Kinsayder. Ben Jonson is called by Judicio "the wittiest fellow of a bricklayer in England ;" while Ingenioso puts in the disguised praise that he is "a mere empiric, one that gets what he hath by observation, and makes only nature privy to what he indites; so slow an inventor that he had better betake himself to his old trade of bricklaying; a bold whoreson, as confident now in making a book as he was in times past in laying a brick."

"William Shakespeare.

Who loves not Adon's love or Lucrece' rape,

His sweeter verse contains heart-throbbing lines,
Could but a graver subject him content,

Without love's foolish lazy languishment."

In such fashion young Cambridge sat in judgment upon. English writers of the last years of Elizabeth.

66

CHAPTER XIV.

66

AS YOU LIKE IT"-" JULIUS CÆSAR HAMLET."

ALL who read Shakespeare are content to hear his works described as a Lay Bible, but many pause when it is added that they are not so by chance.

Shakespeare's

Way of Work.

Every play-every tale with a plot in it, good or bad-is somebody's notion of an interweaving of the lives and actions of men and women, with, so far as it has any plot at all, some problem of human life, and in the end somebody's notion of the way to solve it. A dramatist or novelist, with a low view of life, may represent a hero or a heroine opposing hate to hate, or even cutting the knot of a story with a lie. His works would not be a Lay Bible. Shakespeare, I have said, and repeat, never allows evil to be overcome with evil; he invariably shows evil overcome with good, the diseases of man's life healed only by man's love to God and to his neighbour. Love God, Love your Neighbour, Do your Work: subject the active business of life to the commandments upon which hang all the law and the prophets : Shakespeare's plays contain no lessons that are not subordinate to these. From dogmatism he is free, of the true spirit of religion he is full. It is for this reason that we all agree in feeling that his works are a Lay Bible, however they became so. How could it have come but by the picturing of life with the religious spirit that was in himself? Religion does not forbid cakes and ale. The broadest sympathies are part of

it. The brightest wit may be spent by a dramatist in painting characters and manners of men who speak with their own tongues, and make evil their good, while his own sense of life and truth makes it impossible for him to mislead those whom he is teaching through delight. In Shakespeare's time there was none but Puritan dissent from the opinion set forth by Sir Philip Sidney in his "Defence of Poesy," that the purpose of the poet is to delight and teach, but so to delight that he shall not seem to be teaching.

"He beginneth not with obscure definitions, which must blur the margin with interpretations, and load the memory with doubtfulness, but he cometh to you with words set in delightful proportion, either accompanied with, or prepared for, the well-enchanting skill of music; and with a tale, forsooth, he cometh unto you with a tale which holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimney-corner; and, pretending no more, doth intend the winning of the mind from wickedness to virtue, even as the child is often brought to take most wholesome things by hiding them in such other as have a pleasant taste, which, if one should begin to tell them the nature of the aloes or rhubarbarum they should receive, would sooner take their physic at their ears than at their mouth; so it is in men (most of them are childish till they be cradled in their graves), glad they will be to hear the tales of Hercules, Achilles, Cyrus, Eneas; and hearing them, must needs hear the right description of wisdom, valour, and justice, which, if they had been barely (that is to say, philosophically) set out, they would swear they be brought to school again."

And when the study of a play of Shakespeare's begins with "obscure definitions, which must blur the margin with interpretations and load the memory with doubtfulness," its victim may swear safely not only that he is put to school again, but that he is put to a bad school. Shakespeare's first reason for the choice of a story was that it was a good story, which would please his public, and could be told as a play. Next would inevitably come the business of thinking it over, and conceiving its arrangement into acts. But a story

*"E. W.," ix. 133-138.

is good in proportion to its power of interesting all men, and it must owe that power to something which specially comes home to "" men as they are men within themselves." A poetic mind, even though much lower than Shakespeare's, cannot dwell on any story without finding whereabouts in it that point of interest must lie, and Shakespeare, having found it, found in it the point of sight from which the whole should be presented. So every tale that Shakespeare told, set to the music in himself, falls into harmony with the best truths of life. The best truths are the simplest-never difficult, abstruse, and dark.

Critics there are who peer into holes of the ground, or search under a microscope, for Shakespeare's meaning in a play; who exercise prosaic wit in theories that convert the "Tempest" into an abstruse psychological parable; or who suppose Acts I.-IV. of "King Henry VIII." to be in no relation to the main design of the play, which is a glorification of the House of Tudor, as shown in Act V. They have yet to learn how Shakespeare seeks to walk with us upon our common earth, over the flowers and under the stars that are his fellow-teachers, with nothing more abstruse in his philosophy than that he sees life as one who has found its highest lessons in the Sermon on the Mount.

Shakespeare took his first notion of "As You Like It" from Lodge's "Rosalynde."* Lodge, who had drawn some part of it from the old song of "Gamelyn," meant his tale to be moral. It was called the "Golden Legacy" of Euphues to the sons of Philautus, because, he said, "here may they read that Virtue is the King of Labours, Opinion the Mistress of Fools; that Unity is the Pride of Nature, and Contention the Overthrow of Families." But Shakespeare has added to the tale new spiritual beauty. He wrote the play when his age was about thirty-five; for it was not in Meres's list in the Palladis Tamia (1598); it quotes a line from * "E. W." x. 61.

Marlowe's "Hero and Leander," published in 1598; and it was entered at Stationers' Hall in August, 1600; but there is no known edition of it earlier than the first folio of Shakespeare's works in 1623.

"As You Like It."

In "As You Like It" there are two discords; each is between brother and brother, each is at the outset fierce. They are set in a play full of the harmonies of life, and are themselves reduced to music in the close. One hatred is distinctly conquered by man's love to man ; the other, by man's love to God.

The play opens with the hate of Oliver for his brother Orlando, first told, then shown in action, till one brother is at the other's throat. Faithful affection of old Adam the house-servant strikes, meanwhile, the first note of the higher music. A few words between Oliver and Charles the wrestler touch on the other discord, accompanied also with its softer note in the pure friendship of girls, love between Rosalind and Celia. The first scene ends with a last emphasis upon Oliver's hatred for Orlando, when he stirs the strong wrestler against him.

The second and third scenes, which complete the Act, open to view the other discord through a framework of pure love.

Celia forgets herself in her friend, and is bent only upon cheering Rosalind. They mock Fortune, who "reigns in the gifts of the world, not in the lineaments of nature" They hear of the cruel strength of the wrestler, from Le Beau, the kindliest of courtly simpletons. And when Orlando has touched the heart of Rosalind with pity for his danger, admiration for his courage, triumph for his victory, there comes resentment of Duke Frederick's injustice to the brave son of Sir Rowland du Bois, and warrant for the nearest sympathy, in finding of what house Orlando came:

“My father loved Sir Rowland as his soul,

And all the world was of my father's mind: "

so the young innocence of another form of love begins to swell into that higher music in which all the discords will at last be lost.

When, in the third scene, the discordant mind of the Duke Frederick breaks on the loving talk of the two girls with banishment of Rosalind, Shakespeare varies in a noticeable way from Lodge's story. Throughout he represents in Celia the unselfish love whose life is in another's happiness. From the first word she speaks, her mind is upon Rosalind, not on herself. Lodge, in his tale, made the Duke