RUMIO, the man, has a mind to ape Petruchio, his

GR

master, as well as to play into his master's hands, in the taming of a shrew, his mistress. Hunger is a taming influence, though it may, in excess, become a maddening one; and Grumio amuses himself with alternately exciting and frustrating, inciting and disappointing, egging on and then thrusting back, the hungry lady's cravings. He tantalizes her to the top of his bent,-makes a very Tantalus* of her

So figures Tantalus in the Stygian shades as visited by Odysseus. We are reminded of him in Dante's Adamo of Brescia, as seen in the Inferno, all fevered and athirst: the rills that glitter down the grassy slopes of Casentino, making fresh and soft the banks whereby they glide to Arno's stream, stand ever in his view; and more the pictured semblance dries him up, than does the disease itself from which he suffers. Byron has a stirring battle-field picture, of some who "too near that rolling torrent lie, Whose waters mock the lip of those that die." Well may Horace say Quid rides? to whoso inclines to grin at his picture of Tantalus “ labris sitiens fugientia captans Flumina." Mutato nomine de te Fabula narratur, he adds; and the passage may, or must, have been in Mr. Emerson's mind when he wrote, in his essay on History, "Tantalus is

a

to feed his mirth with her unfed emptiness. Great expectations he raises in her, appetizing propositions he suggests to her, not that she may have a good dinner, but that he may have a good laugh.

"Gru. What say you to a neat's foot?

Kath. 'Tis passing good, I pr'ythee let me have it.
Gru. I fear it is too choleric a meat :

How say you to a fat tripe, finely broil'd?

Kath. I like it well; good Grumio, fetch it me.
Gru. I cannot tell; I fear 'tis choleric.

What say you to a piece of beef, and mustard?

Kath. A dish that I do love to feed upon.

Gru. Ay, but the mustard is too hot a little.

Kath. Why, then the beef, and let the mustard rest.

Gru. Nay, then, I will not; you shall have the mustard,
Or else you get no beef of Grumio.

Kath. Then both, or one, or anything thou wilt.
Gru. Why, then the mustard without the beef.
Kath. Go, get thee gone, thou false deluding slave;

[Beats him.

That feed'st me with the very name of meat."

And if Katharine boxed the varlet's ears, who shall very much blame her? Was there not a box on the ear bestowed by Schacabac on the Barmecide, at the sham feast promoted by the latter in the Arabian Nights' Entertainments?

Such

but a name for you and me,”-as meaning the impossibility of drinking the waters of thought which are always gleaming and waving within sight of the soul. Egens benignæ Tantalus semper dapis, is another Horatian reference. There is a touch of him-though off at the tangent, or indeed at nothing tangible-in the love's labour lost of the Ovidian Narcissus the English is Addison's :

"To the cold waters oft he joins his lips,

Oft catching at the beauteous shade he dips
His arms, as often from himself he slips."

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It is only for a French poet in his cups to have a vision of Tantale ivre mort, dead drunk. Yet Béranger was a water-drinker. Balzac has a vigorous simile to suggest how Delphine loved Rastignac, autant que Tantale aurait aimé l'ange qui serait venu satisfaire sa faim, ou étancher la soif de son gosier desséché." What creature ever fed worse than hoping Tantalus? is Bosola's question in The Duchess of Malfi. Theophilus in The Virgin Martyr gloats on this among other picturesque tortures by him inflicted: "Two hundred rammed in the earth To the

a box on the ear as made the Barmecide fall down, and deprecate another, which Schacabac's uplifted arm had quite ready: the result being that the long-suffering guest was treated by his tantalizing host to a profusion of the dainties, in reality, which he had been so obsequiously eating in fancy. As complaisant the ahungered visitor had been up to the moment of the soufflet, as the guests of Elia's Captain Jackson had by constraint of courtesy to be, when they sat at table with that gallant veteran, and saw with their bodily eyes what seemed a bare scrag-cold savings from the foregone meal-remnant hardly sufficient to send a mendicant from the door contented; while in the revelling imagination of their host "the mind, the mind, Master Shallow,"-whole beeves armpits, and full platters round about them, But far enough for reaching. Eat, dogs, ha ha! ha!" Mephistopheles in Faust's long gown promises (aside) the experience of Tantalus to his presuming pupil :

"And, as in mockery of his greedy haste,

Viands shall hang his craving lips beyond, -
Vainly he'll seek refreshment, anguish-tost."

Coleridge tenderly pities that selfsame experience in the Ass he "hailed brother, spite of the fool's scorn "-tethered as the poor beast was in so tantalizing a way-chained to a log within a narrow spot, where the closeeaten grass could scarce be seen, while sweet around him waved the tempting green.

When in partial response to the screams for "Water! water!" in the Black Hole at Calcutta some skins of the precious fluid were brought to the window, they proved too large to pass through the iron bars, and the sight of this relief, so near and yet withheld, says one historian, served only to infuriate and wellnigh madden the miserable captives, who began to fight and trample one another down, striving for a nearer place to the window, and for a few drops of the water; all to the amusement of the guards, who, so far from pitying, or trying to relieve the sufferers, held up lights to the bars, with fiendish glee, to discern the ensemble, the mêlée, more clearly. As coolly these "assistants" at the performance took it, as Alcibiades in Macaulay's Athenian Revels takes, by imaginative anticipation, the anguish of Speusippus, when he shall "sit starved and thirsty in the midst of fruit and wine like Tantalus. Poor fellow! I think I see your face as you are springing up to the branches and missing your aim." Legendary is the doom poetized in the Indian Fount, for him who has once gazed on those illusory waters :

"Earth has no spring to quench the thirst

That semblance in his soul shall wake,

were spread before them-hecatombs-no end appeared to the profusion. We are reminded of the blow the Barmecide got, when Ben Jonson's Fly presently follows up the line, "He shall think he sees his horse eat half a bushel," with the afterthought, "But, coz, have a care of understanding horses, Horses with angry heels." Not to every temper is it given to exercise imagination on short commons after the manner of John Baptist Cavalletto in the Marseilles prison, when he ate his bit of dry bread with a relish by the help of his fancy sauce. "I can cut my bread so-like a melon. Or so-like an omelette. Or so-like a fried fish. Or so-like Lyons sausage." Triplet, starving playwright, without design or

For ever pouring thro' his dreams

The gush of those untasted streams.
Bright, bright in many a rocky urn

The waters of our deserts lie,
Yet at their source his lip shall burn,
Parch'd with the fever's agony."

The shipwrecked boat's crew in Mr. Charles Reade's Foul Play have their tortures aggravated by the sight of abundance. They drift over coral rocks, and can see five fathoms down, so exquisitely clear the water; can discern small fish drifting over the bottom, upon the driving cloud of which, every now and then, porpoises and dog-fish break in and take their fill. "All this they saw, and yet could not catch one of those billions for their lives. Thus they were tantalized as well as starved.” One man goes mad anon; and as his madness grows upon him, it takes a turn by no means uncommon in such cases: he sees before him sumptuous feasts, and streams of fresh water flowing. "These he began to describe with great volubility and rapture, smacking his lips, and exulting; and so he went on tantalizing them till noon." As in Milton,

"of itself the water flies

All taste of living wight, as once it fled
The lip of Tantalus."

Hardly inferior the torment described in a later book of the Paradise Lost, of those who "greedily plucked the fruitage fair to sight,"—" Oft they essayed, hunger and thirst constraining," only to fill their mouths with ashes: "Thus were they plagued and worn with famine." Nothing so tormenting, rules a divine of Milton's age, as hope snuffed off with disappointment and frustration. And were it lawful to wish an enemy completely miserable, Doctor South would wish that enemy of his might vehemently desire, and never enjoy; if seemingly ever on the point of enjoyment, or within reach of it, so much the better,-because, for the tantalized victim, so much the worse.

malice aforethought, tantalizes his wife and children by reading to them, from the manuscript, as he goes on composing his piece, a grand idea of a sumptuous banquet at which all his dramatis personæ are present: "Music, sparkling wine, massive plate, rose-water in the hand-glasses, soup, fish, -shall I have three sorts of fish? I will; they are cheap in this market. Ah, Fortune, you wretch, here at least I am your master, and I'll make you know it-venison [Triplet therefore goes on writing], game, pickles and provocatives in the centre of the table," etc. Even such another feast Caleb Balderstone promised, or threatened to promise, à posteriori, to the visitors at Wolf's Crag, despite the protests of his master, to whom he uttered the partly cautionary, partly defiant aside, "If ye let me gang on quietly, I'se be moderate in my banquet; but if ye contradict me, deil but I dress ye a dinner fit for a duke!" And what was the dinner he did dress, out of nothing, for the amused and incredulous Ashtons? "Nae muckle provision-might hae served four persons of honour,-first course, capons in white broth-roast kid-bacon with reverence-second course, roasted leveret, butter crabs, a veal florentine-third course, blackcock, plumdamas, a tart, a flam, and some nonsense sweet things and comfits," etc. The peculiar determination of Caleb's manner in detailing his imaginary banquet, excited the almost Homeric laughter of the company; but he stood his ground with a grave, angry, and scornful dignity which but increased their mirth-priding himself as he did on "a description of a dinner," as he afterwards said to Mysie, "That wad hae made a fu' mare hungry, and them to sit there laughing at it!" But some Barmecide idealists come. off with a blow instead of a laugh, when it is hungry folk they are dealing with. To be let off with a broad grin, is a light sentence, compared with such a sound cuff as that of Schacabac's which felled his man.

When Ludovico di Varthema was on his travels in the East, within the first decade of the sixteenth century, his position at Aden was so perilous that he pretended to be mad; and the pretence must have been trying to his digestive