describes her despair to her kindly doctor, and asks, "Do you know anything about that, or do they put it in the doctors' books?" Philaster's outcry of invective is against

66 Nature, too unkind,

That made no medicine for a troubled mind."

King Saul, in a Canadian drama praised by cisatlantic reviewers, demands of his physician a tonic for the heart, and as that official cannot gratify him, he goes on to declare,

"The mind, the mind's the only worthy patient!
Were I one of thy craft, ere this I'd have
Anatomized a spirit; I'd have treated
Soul wounds of my own making . . .

BENT on buying poison for himself, Romeo is at no loss for likely means of procuring it. What though he be in Mantua, and that Mantua's law is death to any vendor of mortal drugs? Romes can call to mind a certain needy apothecary, upon whose need he can rely for gaining his own purpose. The miserable look of the meagre wretch had fixed the pitying gaze of the stranger; and that look was entirely in keeping with the bare and forlorn aspect of his shop. Romeo had marked the man in the act of culling simples; he had been moved by the sight of such tattered attire, and such "overwhelming brows."

More than half-starved that apothecary looked; sharp misery had worn him to the bones :

"And in his needy shop a tortoise hung,*
An alligator stuff'd, and other skins

Of ill-shaped fishes; and about his shelves

A beggarly account of empty boxes,
Green earthen pots, bladders, and musty seeds,
Remnants of packthread, and old cakes of roses,
Were thinly scatter'd, to make up a show."

* Joseph Warton calls this passage a glaring instance of the absurdity of introducing long and minute descriptions into tragedy; and he appeals to those who know anything of the human heart, whether Romeo, in his distressful situation, could have leisure to think of the alligator, empty boxes, and bladders, and other furniture, of this beggarly shop, and to point them out so distinctly to the audience. The description itself, Warton owns to be very lively and natural; but he complains of it as being very improperly put into the mouth of a person agitated with such passion as Romeo is represented to be.

No leisure to think of the shop fittings? answers the critic's critics: what then had Romeo leisure to do? Had he leisure, Charles Knight asks, to run off into declamations against fate, and into tedious apostrophes and generalizations, such as a less skilful artist than Shakspeare would have made him indulge in? From the moment of his resolve to die with Juliet, the apothecary's shop became to Romeo an object of the keenest interest. “Great passions, when they have shaped themselves into fine resolves, attach the most distinct importance to the minutest objects connected with the execution of their purpose." And now that Romeo needed a poison, the apothecary's shop that he had eyed in his placid moments as an object of common curiosity, occurred with a double intensity to his vision; nor was the shaping of the details into words a thing for the audience : it was the very cunning of nature that produced this description. "Mischief was, indeed, swift to enter into the thoughts of the desperate man: but, the mind once made up, it took a perverse pleasure in going over every item of the circumstances that had suggested the means of mischief." Nothing being left for Romeo but to die, all other thoughts had passed out of his mind; and everything connected with the means of his death was seized upon by his imagination with an energy that could only find relief in words. It is criticism of a higher school than Dr. Warton's, which affirms it to have been the intense interest in his own resolve which made Romeo so minutely describe his apothecary.

Speaking topographically, Mr. Dickens incidentally remarked in his Pictures from Italy, that if ever a man was suited to his place of resi

Altogether, an apothecary to look at, and to buy poison of. So Romeo thought; nor was he mistaken in his judgment. Noting this penury, to himself he said, "An if a man did need a poison now, whose sale is present death in Mantua, here lives a caitiff wretch would sell it him." And this same thought of the Veronese outlaw's did but forerun his need; and this same needy man must sell it him-here and now.

So Romeo summons the starveling, and states his case. He holds out forty ducats to the poverty-stricken practitioner, and requires in return a dram of poison only; but of poison such as will do its work perfectly and speedily; such stuff as will disperse itself through all the veins, that the life-weary taker may fall dead. Demurs the listener, deterred by dread of the law?

"Art thou so base, and full of wretchedness,

And fear'st to die? famine is in thy cheeks,
Need and oppression starveth in thy eyes,
Upon thy back hangs ragged misery,
The world is not thy friend, nor the world's law:
The world affords no law to make thee rich;

Then be not poor, but break it, and take this."

His poverty, but not his will, consents. And Romeo pays his poverty, and not his will. "Farewell; buy food, and get thyself in flesh," is the parting salutation of the purchaser to the meagre druggist.

Quod ut facerem, egestas me impulit, might the vendor say with Sophrona in Terence. He could not have gone on to

say with Phormio in a later scene,

"Heus! quanta quanta hæc mea paupertas est, tamen

Adhuc curavi unum hoc quidem, ut mi esset fides."

But what would you have of one who might be described as Doctor Pinch is described in another play of Shakspeare's, as a hungry, lean-faced villain, a mere anatomy,

a needy, hollow-eyed, sharp-looking wretch, a living dead man." Such another in point of looks is the miserly.

dence, and his place of residence to him, the lean Apothecary and Mantua came together in a perfect fitness of things.

schoolmaster in Quevedo, whose house was the abode of Famine, who himself was a skeleton, a mere shotten herring, or like a long slender cane with a little head. upon it; whose eyes were sunk into his head, and whose beard had lost its colour for fear of his mouth, which, being so near, seemed to threaten to eat it for sheer hunger. "His neck was as long as a crane's, with the gullet sticking out so far as if it had been compelled by necessity to start out for sustenance." As he walked, his bones "rattled like a pair of snappers." And as for the room he occupied, there was not a cobweb in it-the spiders being all starved to death. More tragical is the style of the caitiff in Barry Cornwall, so famished, and in such frightful beggary, as to quarrel with the houseless cur for scraps the stomach sickens at ;" one from whose bones "the lean and traitorous flesh had fled, and left a desperate skeleton." Dr. Burney declared it to be difficult. to conceive the possibility of life subsisting in a form so nearly composed of mere skin and bone as that of M. de Voltaire, seen by him at Ferney in 1776; and the patriarch supposed his visitor was "anxious to form an idea of the figure of one walking after death." The shrunk and shrivelled Mr. Pentweazle of fiction is pictured as looking more like those preparations which one sees in Surgeons' Hall, carefully preserved in bottles of spirits, than anything with life in it. We are reminded too of a "scarecrow of rags and bones" of Charles Kingsley's painting; and again of the Job Trotter of Dickens, that "careworn looking man" with such deeply sunken eyes and such long lank jaws, and clad in apparel so seedy and scanty; and of poor starved Smike, who, as Mr. Crummles admiringly criticized him, would without any make-up for the part be such a representative of the Apothecary in Romeo and Juliet as had never been seen before in the country.* Add from Scott the "poor Pottingar" of Perth,

* The reader may remember that the manager engages Smike accordingly for that very part, and how unable the starveling was to get any

Henbane Dwining, that "thin meagre figure of a man, whose diminutive person seemed assimilated to a shadow" -and whom the Gow Chrom threatens to pound in his own mortar, and to beat up his wretched carrion with flower of brimstone, the only real medicine in his booth. "Thou walking skeleton! thou asthmatic gallipot! thou poisoner by profession!"--such are the armourer's terms of greeting to the potticary." And with him may pair off in point of physique the scrivener in Nigelthat "starved anatomy" and cream-faced loon, who in rascality came not very far short of Henbane Dwining. Mr. Charles Reade gives us a "singularly gaunt, angular, and haggard" personage, who, being, dressed in a spruce suit of glossy black, "looked like Romeo's apothecary gone to Stultz with the money." Judge Haliburton gives us a chap as thin as a whippin' post," putting one in mind of a pair of kitchen tongs, all legs, shaft, and head, and no belly; "a real gander-gutted lookin critter, as holler as a bamboo walkin cane, and twice as yaller. He actilly looked as if he had been picked off a rock at sea, and dragged through a gimlet hole." Richardson's lean apothecary in Clarissa is professedly a resemblance of Otway's in Caius Marius, "as borrowed from the immortal Shakspeare," for meagre and very rueful were his looks, and misery had worn him to the bones. Of like parentage is the apothecary Lampedo in Tobin's Honeymoon, whom Balthazar rates as

"thou sketch and outline of a man! Thou thing that hast no shadow in the sun! Thou eel in a consumption, eldest born

more of the part into his head than the general idea that he was very hungry, which-perhaps from old recollections of Dotheboys Hall-he had acquired with great aptitude.

In another story Mr. Dickens makes a plump doctor stigmatize Romeo and Juliet as a play which does anything but justice to our profession.' "There is an apothecary in that drama, sir, which is a low thing; vulgar, sir; out of nature altogether." Saying which, Mr. Jobling pulled out his shirt full of fine linen, as if to indicate what he did call nature in a medical man, sir.