regards all without as cattle to be worked for the ring's advantage and no integral part of the state. But this is always a degeneracy. An aristocracy is naturally, and in history has more often than not so comported itself, a trustee for the whole community, for the poor and the many as much as for the rich and the few. The theory of aristocracy is that the bulk of the people have neither the capacity nor the breeding and training requisite for the right understanding of the good of the whole community, and therefore it is the duty of the select few to do this for them in the interest of all. The nobles are the fathers of the state, which is precisely what Romans called them. A good father will not be moved very much by his children's tastes or opinions; he will not entrust them with duties beyond their capacity; but he will love them more than himself, and will give his life for their advantage. A father that despised and insulted his children because they were feeble, intellectually and bodily, compared with him, would be a monster. Coriolanus made a monster of aristocracy. His attitude to the populace would be more excusable in a democracy, when it might be said, usually with much truth, that the children were ousting the patria potestas, being quite unfit for its exercise. It is strange that we have no type of true aristocracy in this play; for Shakespeare had opportunities of studying it in his own day and in his own country.

So far as Coriolanus has any greatness at all, he is a fine specimen of the natural man, the antithesis of the Christian ideal. More than any one he recalls Achilles,

especially the Horatian version of the literary Achilles.

Impiger, iracundus inexorabilis, acer. Jura neget sibi nata, nihil non arroget armis. Splendid in body; bold, brave, and fierce in spirit; self-centred, despising others, of uncontrollable temper, nourishing hatred, and living for revenge. Wronged, for banishment was an excessive and unjust punishment for his insults to the people, which should have been forgotten in his prowess in his country's defence, he turns sulky, like Achilles, but, worse than Achilles, not only will not help his countrymen, but joins their bitterest enemy and seeks his country's ruin. Only his mother's intercession on her knees staves off the sack of Rome. He is not hard enough to resist his wife's and mother's tears; but there is not a trace of generosity or forgiveness in his yielding. Coriolanus dies in the same swashbuckler spirit in which he had lived, wanting to fight Aufidius and all his relations at the same moment. Splendid, perhaps, but, on the whole, contemptible; on much the same level with those who hounded him out of Rome. An ignoble noble. The best thing one really fine thing-about this terrible fire-eater is his contempt for popularity; he seems to have been less greedy of praise than Achilles. Yet he is ever thinking of himself; it was sheer wounded vanity which goaded him to humiliate his country to his own glory. What a hero this hero might have been! What a lesson he might have taught the people he thought so much in need of teaching! But there was no more magnanimity in him than in them,

Dorothea danced into the hall, with a cry and a laugh which were stifled in her father's embrace. Diane rose instinctively, waiting humbly and silently where she stood. At their parting she had torn herself, weeping and protesting, from his arms; but when he came in to find her now, he would see that she had yielded. The door was half open through which he was to pass-never again to leave her! "Diane is in there."

It was Dorothea's voice that spoke, but the reply reached the far drawing-room only as a murmur of deep, inarticulate bass.

"What's the matter, father?"

Dorothea's clear voice rose above the noise of servants moving articles of luggage in the hall; but again Diane heard nothing beyond a confused muttering in answer. She wondered that he did not come to her at once, though she supposed there was some slight prosaic reason to prevent his doing so.

"Father," Dorothea's voice came again -this time with a distinct note of anxiety-" father, you don't look well. Your eyes are bloodshot."

"I'm quite well, thank you," was the curt reply, this time perfectly audible to Diane's ears. "Simmons, you fool, don't leave those steamer rugs down here."

397

Diane had never heard him speak so to a servant, and she knew that something had gone amiss. Perhaps he was annoyed that she had not come to greet him. Perhaps it was one of the duties of her position to receive him at the door. She had known him to give way occasionally to bursts of anger, in which a word from herself had soothed him. Leaving her place in the corner, she was hurrying to the hall, when again Dorothea's voice arrested her.

Aren't you going in to see Diane?" "No."

From where she stood, just within the door, Diane knew that he had flung the word over his shoulder, as he went up the hall towards the stairway. He was going to his room without speaking to her. For an instant she stood still from consternation, but it was in emergencies like this that her spirit rose. Without further hesitation she passed out into the hall, just as Derek Pruyn turned at the bend in the staircase, on his way upwards. For a brief second, as, standing below, she lifted her eyes to his in questioning, their glances met; but, on his part, it was without recognition.

[TO BE CONTINUED.]

THR

F all the Shakespearian plays, whether wholly or only partially written by Shakespeare, Pericles, it would seem, was the greatest favorite, especially with the unscholarly playgoer. Its popularity was a proverb arousing the jealous anger of other writers whose scholarly equipment failed to win the groundlings, while this much-admired play seemed inexhaustible in its popular appeal. And this popularity did not end with Shakespeare's death, but went on increasing, as will be seen by readers of Ben Jonson's ode,

Come leave the loathed stage

where he jibes at,

Some mouldy tale Like Pericles.

And why this extraordinary popularity? Can it be explained? I think it can.

Whatsoever share Shakespeare took in Pericles-and that he took the lion's share no one can for a moment doubtthe play is one of special and peculiar interest to any one who has studied the laws of cause and effect in imaginative art, especially to him who has studied romantic drama in relation to classic drama. Not Hamlet itself is a more striking example of the romantic attitude towards man and the universe as contrasted with the attitude of the Greeks. Not Hamlet itself is a more striking illustration of the way in which the modern imagination dispenses with the power which in the old world had dominated gods and men-Destiny. Not Hamlet itself presents a more daring picture, sometimes pathetic and sometimes grotesque, of man's chance-medley life in a universe which is itself chancemedley, or, in certain moods, appears to be so. Again, no play is more full of the Elizabethan temper of wonder which died out with James the First, was buried for a century, and then revived and lived

vigorously until, in the latest decade of the nineteenth century, it yielded place for a time to that cynical attitude in confronting the mysterious destiny of man which has always been the note of a decadent literature. I say for a time, -but will the century now opening leave this decadent temper behind when it comes to think for itself?

In Pericles life is represented as entirely a chance-medley, much more SO than in Hamlet, for there the accidents are in great measure the outcome of character. In order that the reader may understand my meaning, I shall have to remind him what the story of Pericleswhich came to the English dramatist through many and various sourcesreally is.

Antiochus, King of Antioch, having determined that his daughter should never be married, sentenced all suitors to death who failed to expound a certain riddle of his own invention-a riddle quite dull enough to have been invented by any king whatsoever.

Notwithstanding the dreadful risk incurred by each aspirant, the charms of the daughter of Antiochus-charms both of body and mind-were so irresistible that they drew many a rash adventurer to his doom, as to each would-be wooer the riddle was recited.

At length appeared a suitor who expounded the riddle. This was Pericles, Prince of Tyre. The treacherous Antiochus, however, still determined to prevent his daughter's marriage, at once set to work to procure his assassination. Pericles, having become apprised of the tyrant's treachery, took means to avoid the peril, and with the hope of saving his own kingdom from invasion he fled from it, leaving his country in charge of his minister Helicanus. He reached Tharsus. There it chanced that he arrived at an opportune moment. A famine