mitres sur leurs têtes." It has been said of the popular oriental reason that it succumbs to the fascination of solemn externals as the guaranties of truth: it reposes in the ceremonials of wisdom; a grave countenance, a venerable beard, a priestly costume, are the tests of a correct and capable instructor. So too, nearer home, "Braid claith lends folk an unco heeze; Maks mony kail-worms butterflees; For little skaith: In short, you may be what you please, In Burns tells Andro Gouk, "You look big, but lay by hat and wig, and ye'll hae a calf's head o' sma' value." church history, ass was a favourite figure of speech with orthodox and heterodox alike. We are constantly lighting upon such words as these of the Cardinal of St. Mark: "An ignorant prince or prelate is but a crowned ass." Luther loved to adorn his frontispieces with caricatures of a pope furnished with a pair of ass's ears.* It was with the connivance of certain priests that "some wretches," as Dean Milman calls them, stole into the church where Savonarola was to preach on Ascension Day (May 4, 1497), and spread an ass's skin as a pulpit-cushion; or as some accounts have it, placed a dead ass on the preacher's seat. In the Feast of Asses, a select animal of that breed, covered with sacerdotal robes, was gravely conducted to the altar, where service was performed, and the ass supplied with drink and provender at recurrent intervals between profane prayer and praise. "Why, friend, a golden ass, A baubled fool, are sole canonical, While pale-cheek'd wisdom and lean-ribbed art * "The Papists are all asses," he comprehensively asserts in one of his diatribes, "and will always remain asses. Put them in whatever sauce you please,-boiled, roasted, baked, fried, skinned, hashed, etc., they are always the same asses." so discourses Marston's hero in Antonio's Revenge. Το another of John Marston's plays we owe the vigorous line, "What though in velvet cloak, yet still an ape," which to some may recall another of Mr. Tennyson's: "Though smock'd, or furr'd and purpled, still the clown;" while it suggests a closer parallel in that old historical drama of King Edward III., of dubious authorship: "Deck an ape In tissue, and the beauty of the robe Adds but the greater scorn unto the beast." But there are those who deem it profaneness and irreverence to call an ape an ape, an ass an ass, if it but wear a monk's cowl on its head, as Coleridge somewhere says. La Fontaine's charlatan has no such compunctious visitings: "Que l'on m'amène un âne, un âne renforcé, Je le rendre maître passé, Et veux qu'il porte la soutane." The same fabulist's version of the Ass in the Lion's skin, who made the world tremble, till he was found out, closes with a moral on the many folks that font du bruit in the world, whose attire and make-up constitute "les trois quarts de leur vaillance." And what is the moral of that other fable of his about the ass that carried relics? "D'un magistrat ignorant C'est la robe qu'on salue." If certain ermines and furs be placed in a certain position we style them a judge, writes Swift in his Tale of a Tub; nor would it have been like the Dean to omit adding, that even so an apt conjunction of lawn and black satin we entitle a bishop. In Gresset's L'Abbaye, "L'âne mitré va se montrer." The oaf in the Country Inn is assured, on high authority, "David, you only want a great wig upon your head and a gown upon your shoulders, to make as good a proser as many that we listen to in the pulpit or on the bench." John Eames tells Lily Dale, touching My lud, there is a great echo in this court," suggested a bronzebrowed barrister to a certain judge, who complained that he could not hear his own voice for an overwhelming donkey in full bray just outside. the head of his office, Sir Raffle Buffle, that there is something imposing about such a man till you're used to it, and can see through it. "Of course it's all padding." bishops, and cabinet ministers, Among the bigwigs, and he fancies that the looking beautiful is the chief part of it. As the British Bibliographer sings : "Ha, ha, ha, ha, the world doth pass Most merrily, I'll be sworn, For many an honest Indian Ass Goes for a Unicorn." We read that an ass's head was sold for eighty pieces of silver. Swift declared, in his time, that they had lately been sold ten thousand times dearer, and yet were never more plentiful. U CHAPTER II. Leontes and Hermione. SI. LEONTES. NDISCERNING readers are apt to regard Leontes as merely a white Othello. They may care for him. infinitely less, and think him infinitely better off in the long run than he deserves; but they look on him as intended to illustrate the same unhappy disposition as the Moor, and to have found it almost equally fatal. Now, on the other hand, discerning critics recognize at once in the idea of the Winter's Tale a genuine jealousy of disposition, and recommend an immediate comparison of it with Othello, which Coleridge affirms to be the direct contrast of it in every particular. For jealousy, he observes, is a vice of the mind, a culpable tendency of the temper, having certain well-known and well-defined effects and concomitants, all of which are visible, and, he boldly says, "not one of which marks its presence in Othello; "-such are, for instance, an excitability by the most inadequate causes, and an eagerness to catch at proofs; a grossness of conception, and a disposition to degrade the object of the passion by sensual fancies and images; a sense of shame of his own feelings exhibited in a solitary moodiness of humour, and yet from the violence of the passion forced to utter itself, and therefore catching occasions to ease the mind by ambiguities, equivoques, by talking to those who cannot, and who are known not to be able to, understand what is said to them, -in short, by soliloquy in the form of dialogue,* and hence a confused, broken, and fragmentary manner; and once more, a dread of vulgar ridicule, as distinct from a high sense of honour, or a mistaken sense of duty; and consequent on this, a spirit of selfish vindictiveness. Elsewhere again Coleridge differentiates sharply the "solemn agony of the noble Moor," as well from the morbid suspiciousness of Leonatus, who is, in other respects, a fine character, as from what he calls "the wretched fishing jealousies of Leontes." In one of the miscellaneous poems Shakspeare himself has told us that "where Love reigns, disturbing Jealousy Doth call himself Affection's sentinel; And in a peaceful hour doth cry, ' Kill, kill.'” The sort of jealousy to which Leontes is a prey is stigmatized none too severely by Paulina, when she tells him—and mark the damning significance of the parenthesis -she will not call him tyrant, "But this most cruel usage of your queen (Not able to produce more accusation Than your own weak-hinged fancy), something savours * For example, the babble with Mamilius-characterized by Coleridge as the king's" strange loss of self-control in his dialogue with the little boy." The doting of the father is expressed with characteristic vehemence and effusion; and in some degree it interests us in favour of both. One likes to read, as in one of Walter Savage Landor's imaginary scenes in Æschylus, of such a king as the king of men, Agamemnon, tossing Orestes above his joyous head, and calling him his crown; or, in Gibbon, of Attila relaxing from his savage sternness, to greet his youngest boy, Irnac, with an eager smile, aud pinch his cheek with demonstrative fondness. The misgivings of Leontes are echoed by Schiller's Philip II., in the scene where that suspiciously-disposed despot toys with the Infanta : "No-sure she is my daughter-or can nature Thus to my heart-thou art my own but even so saying, a dismal doubt overshadows the king: he fancies he |