to have been already attacked by a malady which he concealed.* Mary of Burgundy, dying within a few days of her fall from horseback, is said to have preferred death to the assumed indignity of examination by her medical attendants; the daughter, like the father, as Michelet puts it, perishing through a point of honour. Anne of Austria seems rather to have tried to conceal, than to have succeeded in doing so, the acute suffering which was one day to have a fatal issue. More successful was Queen Caroline, consort of our George II., whom "false delicacy" induced to conceal from her attendants the malady which killed her. Her real disease being undivulged even to her physicians, they treated her complaint as gout in the stomach, and prescribed remedies which aggravated the evil (rupture). When it was at length discovered, the malady was already beyond their skill; though one of the surgeons declared that, had he known it two days sooner, Her Majesty should have been walking about the next day. We may apply Horace again, with a wrench or twist of his meaning however: "Neu, si te populus sanum recteque valentem Dissimules, donec manibus tremor incidat," and all through the pudor malus, the false shame, stigmatized in the line previously quoted. The hard, proud side of this pudor is notably instanced in perhaps the most effective character-portrait ever drawn by Mrs. Gore,-the Mrs. Armytage, namely, of Female Domination, into the surmises of whose nearest friends it never entered that she was labouring under an agonizing and fatal disease. Tortured by pain, she was tortured still worse by the efforts necessary to repress its expression. To be above pain was thought manly by the Stoics, who did not see, observes Mr. Lewes, that, in this respect, instead of being above Humanity, they sank miserably * A carbuncle had manifested itself below the knee; and a cold bath, which he took to calm the burning irritation, perhaps occasioned, suggests Sismondi, the Kaiser's sudden and unexpected death. below it; for if it is a condition of our human organization. to be susceptible of pain, it is only affectation to conceal the "expression" of that pain. "Could silence stifle pain, it were well; but to stifle the cry, is not to stifle the feeling; and to have a feeling, yet affect not to have it, is pitiful. The savage soon learns that philosophy; but the civilized man is above it. You receive a blow, and you do not wince? So much of heroism is displayed by a stone." And stone enters largely into the composition of such a character as the one thus characterized in Leigh Hunt's Feast of the Violets "And poor Mrs. Armytage, warning exaction, Sits arm-chair'd for ever, a dread petrifaction." We are reminded of une femme mourante, et qui cherche a mourir, the Phèdre of Racine : "Phedre atteinte d'un mal qu'elle s'obstine à taire, Lasse enfin d'elle-même et du jour qui l'éclaire,”— and of whom her closest confidante has this to allege, that "elle meurt dans mes bras d'un mal qu'elle me cache." Resolute the queen seemed to die and make no sign. In his account of the last illness and the death of his endeared friend, Froben the printer, who throughout his long life had never been laid up with sickness, Erasmus describes a serious fall he had had, six years previously, from the top. of the stairs on a tiled floor,-the effects of which accident he was studious to conceal; for Froben "was a man of such a high spirit that he was ashamed to let it be seen that he was in pain." Towards the last, two of the fingers of his right hand became paralysed, "showing that death was not far off; but this also he concealed, thinking it unmanly in any respect to give way to disease." There may not have been much of the antique Roman in Gibbon's compositionmeaning his personal or physical composition, not his composition of the Decline and Fall, for there is plenty of antique Rome in that but by Lord Sheffield's account he was fatally reticent in regard of the disease which carried him off. "I did not understand," writes his noble friend, "why he, who had talked with me on every other subject relative to himself and his affairs without reserve, should never in any shape hint at a malady so troublesome; but on speaking to his valet de chambre, he told me, Mr. Gibbon could not bear the least allusion to that subject, and never would suffer him to notice it." "Although the disorder continued to increase gradually, and of late years very much indeed, he never mentioned it to any person, however incredible it may appear, from 1761 to November 1793," when in effect it was too late. Yet was Edward Gibbon just the man to have appreciated to the full the spirit of Boilean's strain: "Misérables jouets de notre vanité, Faisons au moins l'aveu de notre infirmité. A quoi bon, quand la fièvre dans nos artères brûle, Quelle fausse pudeur à feindre vous oblige? Qu'avez-vous? Je n'ai rien. Mais . . . je n'ai rien, vous dis-je, Repondra ce malade à se taire obstiné. Mais cependant voilâ tout son corps gangrené." GEE CHAPTER V. Friar Laurence. ERVINUS represents Friar Laurence as a kind of chorus. expressing Shakspeare's own ethical ideas, and his opinions respecting the characters and action of his play. The answer to this notion is valid, that it is not Shakspeare's practice to expound the moralities of his artistic creations; nor does he ever by means of a chorus stand above and outside the men and women of his plays, who are bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. "No! Friar Laurence also is moving in the cloud, and misled by error as well as the rest." Professor Dowden forcibly contends that Shakspeare has never made the moderate, self-possessed, sedate person a final or absolute judge of the impulsive and the passionate; the one sees a side of truth which is unseen by the other; but to neither is the whole truth visible. The Friar, we are reminded, had supposed that by virtue of his prudence, his moderation, his sage counsels, his amiable sophistries, he could guide these two young, passionate lives, and do away with the old traditions of enmity between the houses; and there in the tomb of the Capulets is the return brought in by his investment of kindly scheming. Shakspeare did not believe that the highest wisdom of human life was acquirable by mild, monastic meditation, and by gathering of simples in the coolness of the dawn. Friar Laurence, too, old man, had his lesson to learn." As Gervinus among the Germans, so Philarète Chasles, of the modern French school, regards the Friar as Shakspeare's ow nmouthpiece. Le vieil ermite is cited as a personage "dont le seul emploi est de philosopher," and whose voice, c'est la voix de Shakspeare, " qui après avoir analysé curieusement les âmes humaines, l'inanité de nos désirs et le terrible fin de nos passions consumées par leur intensité, pousse un long et sublime gemissement."* In another of his books the French critic refers to the presence in the original story, of a mere complaisant priest, conveniently accommodating, who admits at one side of his confessional the lover, at the other his mistress, and who bestows his facile benediction on their interviews. Arthur Brooke made of this monk a facetious personage, a sort of jolly good fellow with a monomania for marriage-making. And what is he become in Shakspeare, as M. Chasles depicts him? An aged philosopher, whose wonder it is that the beatings of a youthful heart can stifle reason and prudence; one whose white beard, mild visage, venerable air, and healthy lofty moral tone, accord well with his physical surroundings.† Etudes sur le drame Espagnal, § iv. + Culling herbs, and moralizing on their several virtues,-it is pleasantly picturesque, the figure he presents in this pursuit. Foot-notes might run to seed in variegated illustration of this basketing of simples, -after the manner of Friar Laurence with his "osier cage,” to be filled at daybreak with medicinal flowers. The Attendant Spirit in Comus brings to mind a certain shepherd lad, of small regard to see to, yet well skilled in every virtuous plant and healing herb that spreads her verdant leaf to the morning ray; and this observant collector would "ope his leathern scrip, And show me simples of a thousand names, Telling their strange and vigorous faculties." A century earlier had Thomas Tusser sung the praises of the "good huswife" who cultivates "Cold herbs in her garden, for agues that burn, That over-strong heat to good temper may turn," etc. In Spenser's third book we see the aged nurse cull rue, and savine, and the flower of camphora, and calamint, and dill,—with as precise a knowledge of their virtues as Southey's Iolo could boast— "Iolo, old Iolo, he who knows The virtue of all herbs of mount or vale, Or greenwood shade, or quiet brooklet's bed." Latter-day critics of the "simples " by which George Herbert set so much store in his Country Parson, and the lore of which Gerarde details with such faith in his Herbal, affirm most of them to be wholly or comparatively harmless, nay, perhaps even efficacious, if faith attend the using of |