weak voice continued, plaintively. "The docthors will be afther gettin' thim for ye. But you'd betther take care that they don't be helpin' thimsilves."

"Patrick," put in Mr. Weedon at last, "you've overtaxed yourself-don't talk any more." As he spoke his face was redder than ever, and, rising, he tiptoed hastily away.

A few minutes later he was in consultation with the resident surgeon. The latter was of the immediate opinion that, the aid of the X-ray should be called in before determining upon any plan of prospecting, and on being assured that it was painless, the patient agreed to submit to the process. But when all was ready for the photographic survey, the Mine's courage began to dwindle. When he was wheeled into the laboratory and saw the preparations that had been made -the big bulbs, the electric connections, the ominous glass table, and all of ithe restrained with difficulty the temptation to make a dash for the stairway.

It was plainly shown that Mr. Fitzpatrick was the possessor of a minor portion of a paper of tin tacks, some sections of a watch chain, five or six screws of assorted sizes, and other objects; but

749

nothing that could be affirmed to be a diamond had left any trace of its existence. The Itinerant Mine was humbled and humiliated beyond words to express. His importance had vanished. He was a fraud, a delusion, and a snare.

It was while he was in this state of depression that news came from Cape Town that "Social" Benton had turned King's evidence. The Von Weiner Diamond Mine Company, Ltd., owed their former employee a humble and substantial apology. Mr. Wigmore Weedon attempted to rally him to a state of hope. As soon as he could leave the hospital and was able to make the voyage, his old position would be found open to him.

It was with a perfunctory politeness that Patrick Fitzpatrick thanked him. "But d'ye think," said he, "that the photygraps could be mistaken?"

Mr. Weedon shook his head. "I haven't the least idea in the world that O'Fallon or Mooney thought you had a diamond to your skin, Patrick," he concluded. "It was a mad chance to try to get a title to the stones they had stolen." And to think av that," said the exMine, slowly-" to think av that! The dirty I. D. Bs.!"

66

Τ

HE reader will perceive that in criticising Cymbeline my object has been to take independent views of the world's great dramatist-to apply, and to apply fearlessly, to his work the selfsame critical canons as are universally applied to all other imaginative writers, never forgetting, however, Coleridge's saying, "assuredly that criticism of Shakespeare will alone be genial which is reverential."

I will begin by saying a few words on the subject that is being now discussed by Tolstoy and others-Shakespeare in relation to the twentieth century.

That his name has dominated the nineteenth century has been made manifest by treatises upon him and his works that can almost be numbered by the thousand. Will it dominate the twentieth century? That depends, I think, not so much upon his poetical genius, and not so much upon the adequacy or inadequacy of his philosophy of life to the new century's cosmogony of growth, but rather upon the aesthetic principles of his art. What are those principles? Is not the entire tendency of his work expressed by Joubert's saying, "Fiction has no business to exist unless it is more beautiful than reality"? Shakespeare, in spite of his occasional coarseness and his lapses from good taste, shows a quest of the beautiful far surpassing that of all other poets. Is this quest of beauty, in which he is so transcendent, the proper quest? I think it is. But that being so, what about the twentieth century, whose quest, at present, is an entirely different one-the quest of the ugly, the most squalid, cynical realism? Should this quest continue Shakespeare's position will indeed suffer a change.

The reason why I think with Joubert that fiction has no business to exist unless it is more beautiful than reality is this. Man was not really born in Paradise. No, he descended, as the twentieth

century is only too well aware, from a certain hairy animal living in the trees, described by Darwin.

Now that descent cannot be called lovely, and the more the poet makes us forget it, by his beautiful dream of what man may, and perhaps will, some day become, the better for mankind. If the twentieth century continues to think otherwise, it will batten upon the literature it likes, and then, exit Shakespeare.

No play is more full of Shakespeare's passion for beauty than Cymbeline. And this is why I have dwelt so fully upon the subject. Take, for instance, the scene in Imogen's bedchamber, when Iachimo has emerged from the chest to carry out his treacherous purpose. All poets feel that there is nothing in the world so lovely as a lovely woman, and Shakespeare above all others shows this. But he who ventures to describe a lovely woman in her bedchamber treads on dangerous ground, as we see in Marlowe's Hero and Leander, and in too many other English poems. Shakespeare and Keats alone have come out of the perilous situation with safety. The bedroom scene in Keats' "Eve of St. Agnes," for purity as much as for beauty, is worthy to stand beside a scene like this:

How bravely thou becomest thy bed, fresh lily,

And whiter than the sheets! That I might touch!

752

lution of the plot, is a mole with a group of golden hairs surrounding it. To Shakespeare there was clearly something repellent in the idea of hairs, whether golden or not, marring the ivory globes of a beautiful woman's bosom. And yet, in any dramatization of the story a mole was necessary; for some striking and easily recognized peculiarity of the bosom could not be dispensed with. See how easily the poet of beauty gets over the difficulty:

On her left breast A mole cinque-spotted, like the crimson drops

I' the bottom of a cowslip.

Shakespeare's quest of beauty indeed is incessant. And it grew upon him, as indeed the love of beauty does grow with the years. There is perhaps more beauty in his later plays than in his earlier plays. He was a man fairly advanced in years when he produced The Tempest. It is overweighted with beauty. In all his plays we see that beauty is made a perpetual quest. At every turn we see that while toiling in London, new-vamping old plays of other dramatists, or recasting and enriching such new ones as were sent for the theatre's acceptance from Oxford to Cambridge, there was, beneath his consciousness of the play he was working on, an ever-shining mirrorthe magic mirror of youthful memory This mirror was bright with the shimmer of Avon as it wound through the meadows he loved-meadows colored with the tints of the Warwickshire flowerswinking marybuds, cuckoo-pints, cowslips, oxlips

Daffodils,

That come before the swallow dares, and take

The winds of March with beauty. Whenever he was in need of a poetical image, or lovely fancy, to illustrate or beautify a passage, he had only to look down into this magic mirror, and there was the very picture he wanted, ready for use. Thus it was with the substitution of the crimson drops in the cowslip for the golden hairs. Those who are familiar with the cowslips of Avon meadows know that the warm-colored spots in a cowslip's bell are of a deeper hue than in most other specimens of the flower. Therefore I say, in spite of Steevens, that

"crimson" is the very word to describe it. When Shakespeare wants an adjective that shall express for ever in one word all the charm of the violet, he has only to look down into this mirror to find it: Violets dim,

But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes
Or Cytherea's breath.

In the Avon side meadows, the dimmer the violet the more exquisite is the perfume.

As to Imogen, Shakespeare is in love with her, as we all are. Note how he never forgets that she is an English girl, and note how he never forgets that she is a great lady - a princess. Upon no one of Shakespeare's women has there been more eulogistic writing than upon her. Mr. Swinburne concludes his remarks upon Cymbeline in A Study of Shakespeare with the following words: "I am therefore something more than fain to close my book upon the name of the woman best beloved in all the world of song and all the tide of time; upon the name of Shakespeare's Imogen."

And yet, perhaps, most of the critics have missed the one feature of her character that makes her the idol of the English race her bravery. Her naïveté, her affectionateness, her sweetness, have all been dwelt upon. But her bravery it is that makes her to Englishmen the most bewitching of all Shakespeare's women, who, as a rule-to which, however, Cordelia is an exception-are soft and tender rather than brave. In the English feeling about the ideal girl there is, no doubt, the inherited reminiscence of our Norse ancestry. Women took a vastly more important place among the Norsemen than among other races. While Griselda is the type of admirable womanhood in romance literature, the ideal of womanhood with her Norse forefathers was Brynhild.

Imogen's bravery shows that in his portrait of her Shakespeare intended to paint the ideal English girl. And see how he has transfigured the heroine of the Italian story where she is thus introduced when confronting her wouldbe murderer: