dignified person than the mere man of trade. A merchant, it is true, waits with a jeweller, but also with a painter and a poet, in the anteroom of silly, sumptuous Timon. But ordinarily, the merchant is a more dignified person, extending courtesy to strangers, as in The Comedy of Errors, taking risks for his merchandise and for himself, as in the case of old Ægeon, in the same play, who has ventured on markets forbidden and is imprisoned for his daring. The most notable Shakespearean merchant is, of course, Antonio, the merchant prince of Venice, an adventurer in the Elizabethan sense into strange markets and a gambler for high commercial stakes. His gravity- or presaging melancholy — befits his dignity, and his generosity to Bassanio, a fellow adventurer (but in more than the Elizabethan sense), is only equalled by his authority among his fellow merchants and his scorn of the unrighteous Jew. Shylock, too, is of the merchant class, but a pariah alike for his race and his practice of usury. But Shylock will take us into precincts irrelevant; for the Jew, whatever your thought of him or mine, is not of the common folk even of Shakespeare.

Next to the merchants come Shakespeare's seamen, the noble-minded Antonio of Twelfth Night, Sebastian's friend, the outspoken sea-captain, boatswain and mariners of The Tempest, the attendant sailors and fisher folk of Pericles. Shakespeare was a landsman; save for an occasional line, his descriptions of the sea, in the richest of all literatures in this respect, are none of them important. The mariner as such he treats with the respect due a person only partially

known. With the soldier, in a martial age, Shakespeare was better acquainted and he knew him from the kings and great commanders of the historical plays to such military men of pasteboard and plaster as Parolles, Nym and Pistol. Of Falstaff's levy and his rabble attendants, from Bardolph of the carbuncled nose to the minute page, it may be said that they cut a sorrier figure in France than at the Boarshead in Eastcheap. But Shakespeare's army levied better men than these; the heroic gunners on the walls of Orleans, the brave and capable captains of four kingdoms, Gower, Fluellen, MacMorris, and Jamey in Henry V, and the manly English soldiers Bates, Court and Williams. If the refined modern critic, versed in the interminable researches of an incessantly prying age, would learn whether the old dramatist, Shakespeare, had any notions as to the mental processes and moral stability of the common man, let him read and ponder the simple incident of King Henry, incognito, and the soldier Williams with their arguments pro and con as to the responsibility of princes. Williams is the type of the honest, fearless, clearheaded" man in the street" who honors his king, not slavishly because he is a king, but for the qualities that make him kingly, who respects manhood (his own included) above rank and is the more valiant that he knows the cost of valor. There are several well-known tales of military devotion of the soldier, wounded unto death in a quarrel, the righteousness or wrong of which he cares not even to inquire, who dies, blessed and content that he has obeyed, in unquestioning faith, the

august commands of his master. These anecdotes are not English. Williams is not of this type. His free soul will challenge his gage in the eye of his prince and when his heart tells him he is right, let the devil forbid. Shakespeare, too, knew the common man, and his trust was in him. Nor did our wise old dramatist, for all his scenes of the pomp and circumstance of war, forget its terror, its sorrow and its pathos. In the third part of Henry VI, that unhappy king is seated alone on the field of battle as the struggle surges away from him. And there enters "a son that hath killed his father dragging in the dead body," and later "a father bearing of his [dead] son." Poignant are the words of these common men in their common woe, the battle woe of all ages and all times in the grip of which the least are as the great and the greatest as the poorest.

In the taverns, the brothels and the jails, Shakespeare found the foulmouthed, the ignorant and the dishonest and he represented them in all these particulars in a faithful, if at times, forbidding, reality to life. Moreover, his prejudice against evil is pronounced in the very repulsiveness of such scenes. He knows that there are impostors among beggars, that trial by combat is only a somewhat cruder method of getting at the truth than trial by jury, that there are corrupt and incompetent magistrates and fools abounding in all walks of life. Moreover, he depicts in his plays a feudal state of society, for such was English society in his day. But there is nothing in these honest dramatic pictures of English life, from the king on his throne to Abhorson with his headsman's axe, to declare Shake

speare prejudiced against any class of his fellow countrymen. Wherefore, our obvious generalization as to Shakespeare's attitude toward common folk, whether they be learned or unlearned, is this: he found among them the stupid, the ignorant, the pretentious and the absurd; but he found likewise in each class the earnest, the honorable and capable, and honored each after his kind as such. For their follies he ridiculed them; for their virtues, which he recognized, he loved them, deflecting neither to ridicule nor respect because of sta

VII

"SIDNEY'S SISTER, PEMBROKE'S MOTHER "

HE ELIZABETHAN lady of title is our theme,

TH

the Elizabethan titled lady in her dignity and power to foster high ideals, in her place as patron and encourager of letters, and in the function by which she added, in the degree of her ability, to the splendid chorus of song, the wealth of drama, and the spirit of the devotion of her time. There were several noble ladies who fulfilled in some sort these conditions. To one or other of them many important contemporary books were inscribed; and, again and again, were they sung and sonneted by the poets. Some are charmingly and allegorically figured by Spenser, with other ladies of Elizabeth's court, in Colin Clouts Come Home Again. But without enumeration here, none so completely fulfills our conditions of a patron, a writer herself, and an encourager of letters, as does the sister of the renowned Sir Philip Sidney, Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, who long survived her heroic brother and that grave honorable gentleman, her husband, Henry Herbert, second Earl of Pembroke. It is a commentary on the mutations of time that the two noble sons who were the product of this union, William Herbert, who succeeded to his father's earldom, and his brother, Philip, Earl of Montgomery, are best remembered as the two