young people really fell in love with one another, though this passed unnoticed in the family. By-and-by an official colleague asked for her in marriage, and Chang gave his consent. At this the two lovers were in despair, and Wang forthwith pretended that his interests required his presence at the capital. An attempt was made to keep him, but in vain; so after being well supplied with everything necessary he bade a mournful adieu and stepped on board his boat. By sunset he was already at anchor some leagues away; but at midnight he was still unable to sleep, when suddenly he heard sounds of someone running hurriedly along the bank, until the footsteps reached his boat. Calling out, he found that it was Ch'ien-niang, who had come alone and barefoot. Overcome with joy, he seized her hand and asked what it all meant; to which she replied, 'A sense of your deep love for me has forced me to this pass. I know that your feelings will never change. I make this sacrifice of myself to you, and that is why I have run away and come hither.' Delighted beyond all hope, Wang concealed her on the boat and set off, travelling day and night with all speed until, a month or two later, he arrived at his destination. Five years came and went, during which two boys were born to them, without any news of Chang I. Ch'ien-niang began to long to see her parents again, and with tears in her eyes said to Wang Chou, 'In days gone by, five years ago, I could not resist, but cast aside my duty for your sake. I would now see if any of my people are still among the living.' Wang pitied her and said, 'Don't cry; you shall go;' and very soon they all set out to return to Hêng-chou. On arrival Wang went ahead by himself to his uncle's house to make his peace; but the uncle said, 'Ch'ien-niang is lying ill in the women's apartments. Why these lies?' 'I have just left her on board the boat,' replied Wang; whereupon his uncle was astounded, and hurriedly sent off a messenger, who found that she really was there. Moreover, she joyously inquired from the messenger if her father was quite well; at all of which the messenger was greatly astonished and hurried off to tell his master. When the girl in the women's apartments heard what had happened, she arose rejoicingly and dressed herself up, smiling, but never uttering a word, and went forth to meet the newcomer. The two girls fell into each other's arms; and in a moment coalesced, so that there was only a single body left, dressed, however, in duplicate sets of clothes. The family hushed the affair up as being uncanny; but still it came to the ears of various relatives. HERBERT A. GILES. T'ai-yüan, known as Pe-king (= northern capital) under the T'ang Dynasty. ÆSCHYLUS AND SHAKESPEARE THE programme of the Annual Shakespeare Festival at Stratford-onAvon, recently issued by the Governors of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, has for its leading feature the presentation of an English version of the Oresteia of Eschylus, in close conjunction with Shakespeare's Hamlet, King Lear, Richard II., and The Tempest. The experiment is a deeply interesting one, and the attempt to illustrate Shakespeare's art by bringing it into comparison on the stage with the dramatic masterpieces of other times and other lands will be followed with close attention, and may lead to important develop For the first essay in this kind, no better choice could have been made than the great trilogy of the first Athenian dramatist whose work has come down to us otherwise than in fragments. Eschylus, the son of Euphorion, was born in 525 B.C., at Eleusis, of a family of the old nobility. His boyhood witnessed the downfall of the tyranny of the Peisistratids and the establishment of the enlarged democracy of Cleisthenes. His opening manhood was cast in the heroic days of the great struggle against the Persian hosts for the liberty of Greece, of which struggle Athens was the protagonist. He himself fought at Marathon in 490, and served in person in all the great battles of the second Persian invasion, Artemisium, Salamis, Platea, of the second of which he has left a magnificent description in the tragedy of the Persa. His riper years were contemporaneous with the extension of the democratic principle by the reforms of Pericles, by which the balance of power was transferred from the oligarchic families to the new democracy of the whole Athenian people. In more than one respect, therefore, his life experience presents analogies to that of Shakespeare, whose first twenty-four years coincide with the great struggle against Rome and Spain which culminates in the defeat of the Armada in 1588; while the latter half of his life witnesses the beginnings of that reaction against the power of the Crown which was to issue in the Great Rebellion. The formative years of both poets, therefore, are lived in a period when national feeling has been raised to its highest power by a struggle in which the national existence itself is at stake; and the reflection of that struggle is seen not only in the general quickening of thought and imagination peculiar to such periods, but more specifically in the white heat of patriotic feeling which glows and flashes through their dramas. Take, for instance, the passage in the Eumenides of Eschylus in which the Chorus of Furies, overcome by the persuasion of Athene, consent to lay aside their wrath and to become patron goddesses of the Attic land (Eum. 862 sqq.) : Ch. What chant dost bid me raise to greet the land? Ath. Such as aspires towards a victory Unrued by any: chants from breast of earth, From wave, from sky; and let the wild wind's breath Pass with soft sunlight o'er the lap of land,— Strong wax the fruits of earth, fair teem the kine, Unfailing, for my town's prosperity, And constant be the growth of mortal seed. Doth fend from sorrow. Such the proffered boon. Ch. Lo, I accept it: at her very side Doth Pallas bid me dwell: I will not wrong the city of her pride, Which even Almighty Zeus and Ares hold Heaven's earthly citadel, Loved home of Grecian Gods, the young, the old, The sanctuary divine, The shield of every shrine! For Athens I say forth a gracious prophecy, The glory of the sunlight and the skies Shall bid from earth arise, Warm wavelets of new life and glad prosperity.1 How close does the feeling of this passage come to the soliloquy of John of Gaunt in Shakespeare's Richard II. (II. i. 40 sqq.): This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle, This other Eden, demi-paradise, Against the envy of less happier lands, This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England. This land of such dear souls, this dear, dear land, Again, both poets live in a time when democracy-in neither case From the translation by Mr. E. D. Morshead, M.A. such a democracy as we to-day understand by the term, but a democracy in which political power shall be vested in what, for lack of a better word, we may call the middle class-is winning its way, step by step, against oligarchical privilege or royal prerogative. Eschylus, the man of action, the man who has fought side by side with his less nobly born fellow citizens, and thereby learnt the supreme lesson of human comradeship and brotherhood as underlying all distinctions of rank and class, is perhaps more in sympathy with the movement than Shakespeare, the man of quiet thought and of delicate and refined imagination. Yet in Eschylus there is again and again the warning against the unbridled wilfulness of popular rule, such as breathes in the following passage (Eum. 666): Therefore, O citizens, I bid ye bow In awe to this command, Let no man live And it is to preserve this sense of awe and reverence that in the Eumenides he pleads for the preservation of the ancient, sacred, incorruptible court of the Areopagus threatened by the reforms of Pericles. On the other hand, while Shakespeare's sympathies are strongly enlisted on the side of the strength and refinement of the aristocratic character, no less strong is his condemnation of irresponsible despotism in the person of Richard II. or Macbeth, and even the clamorous shifting mob of Coriolanus is introduced with the touch of sympathy and understanding The gods know I speak this in hunger for bread, not in thirst for revenge. But the times of Æschylus and Shakespeare are not only times of national struggle and democratic development; they present a deeper likeness in that each is a time when old moral and religious conceptions are breaking up, and the new conceptions which are to take their place are not yet formulated. As Mr. Haigh has well said in his Tragic Drama of the Greeks: The sixth century, in which Eschylus passed his early years, was one of great stir and movement in matters of religion and speculation. The old theogonies of Homer and Hesiod, with their primitive morality and simple conception of the gods, had long since failed to satisfy the higher minds among the nation. The prevalence of deeper aspirations and a more searching curiosity is proved by many symptoms. Associations such as the Orphic societies and the Pythagorean brotherhoods, with their ascetic rules of life and their doctrines of immortality, began about this time to acquire their wide-spread popularity. The mysticism of Pherecydes, the pantheistic dreams of Xenophanes, and the cosmic speculations of Thales and Anaximander, are equally typical of the new spirit of the age. All these various tendencies, philosophical and religious, must have had their influence in forming the opinions of Eschylus (p. 86). And just as in the youth of Eschylus the old Grecian polytheisms were breaking up, so Shakespeare's boyhood was contemporaneous with England's final rejection of the great medieval system of Christianity, while the reformed Christianity was still seeking its adequate expression and final form. A dramatic genius born in such a time will use the old forms, the old beliefs, but in using he will transform them, make them vehicles for the deeper thought which is struggling to utter itself, symbols of the new conception of the universe which is dimly revealing itself to him. Thus, in the Oresteia Eschylus takes the old story of the house of Agamemnon, the conception of the relentless Fate which in each generation brings upon its members the pollution of kindred blood, which causes Atreus to set before his brother Thyestes the banquet of his slain children's flesh, which compels Agamemnon, the son of Atreus, to sacrifice his daughter Iphigeneia to Artemis that the fleet Troyward-bound may no more be hindered by adverse winds, and thereby stirs Clytemnestra his wife to such deadly hate that she gives herself in lawless love to Ægisthus, son of Thyestes, and by his aid murders her husband even in the hour of his triumphant home-coming; the Fate that drives Orestes, her son, to avenge his father's murder by the shedding of his mother's blood, and then delivers him in turn to the Furies, which, with relentless vengeance, pursue the matricide. That conception of a mysterious inexplicable Fate Eschylus takes, and with it the kindred conception of the envy of heaven against over-great prosperity, but in using he refines and moralises them. In the Oresteia there is, from the opening speech of the watcher for the beacon fire which is to tell of Ilium's fall, the sense of doom over the house, which recurs again and again in the musing of the Chorus of Argive elders. The very name given to Helen at her birth has foretold, with divine prescience, the woes of which she is destined to be the spring (Agam. 664) : ἑλέναυς, ἕλανδρος, ἑλέπτολις. Say from whose lips the presage fell? Who read the future all too well, And named her, in her natal hour, Guiding his tongue with prescient power. War, sprung from her, and death did lour, Tò μéλλov ĥ§εl. What will be, will be (Agam. 1211). But the Fate, as Eschylus conceives of it, is no blind force of |