Sleep peacefully, poor Ophelia, thy dark-souled lover will be with thee

anon!

A fairer couple come forward now, fairer even than Ophelia; 'tis Verona's loveliest daughter Juliet, and with her is love-lorn Montague. How pleasantly do the scenes in that sweetest of love stories crowd upon us now as we see, in our "mind's eye," the forms of the lovers. How pleasantly fall the accents of Juliet's voice as she says softly:

Poor lovers! In your case, indeed, the course of true love ran not smooth. Why were your young lives so beset, your sweet dreams so rudely broken? Well may we say with the Prince :

"Never was a story of more woe,

Than this of Juliet and her Romeo."

The face of our bard brightens, we shall see a lighter crowd of fancies anon. Ah, here comes a merry company, in good sooth. Sir John, "Old Jack" rather, is there rolling his fat paunch, and roaring lustily for sack; ay, and swearing there's lime in it when it comes, and that the world is a villainous world, with no honest men in it save old Jack Falstaff himself. There is red-nosed, drunken, ne'er-do-weel Bardolph, staggering along in the scandalous old knight's company, and ancient Pistol vaunting as usual, and flourishing his sword in mid air. Ah, you knaves, you will be for the Three Cranes in the Vintry, I warrant me, or the Bear at Bridge-foot, there to make a merry night of it, and I fear me much that worthy Master Bardolph will have to cool his fiery nose against the prison bars to-morrow for fighting with the watch, or calling a nobleman's serving-man ill names. "Go thy ways, old Jock," and take a friend's advice; mend thy ways too, and take less sack in thine old age, and have no dealings with the merry wives of Windsor, lest a worse thing befal thee than the buck-basket and the ducking at Datchet Mead.

So, the roystering blades have passed on; Mercutio and a few of his sword-drawing friends have followed to some ordinary, there to eat and drink and gamble; and now comes a crowd of gentles, with rustling skirts, and waving plumes, and clinking spurs. Here is Benedict, exchanging biting witticisms with Beatrice; and here is statuesque Hermione, and sweet Perdita; and hush, draw back, you purer, gentler ones-draw back you fond mothers, you innocent white-souled maidens --for yonder stalks the remorseless consort of Macbeth, see how pale her stern face is, see how she glares about as though she too had heard those awful words,

"Sleep no more! Macbeth hath murdered sleep!"

She sees pale, blood-stained, stricken Duncan in every shadow on the

wall, she hears the clang of the war-trumpets, she sees the waving woods of Birnam coming fast on fated Dunsinane, she hears the savage cry of her fierce lord, the words of a dying man,

"Lay on, Macduff,

And damn'd be he who first cries, Hold enough!"

And art thou there too, sad Catherine, gentle lady, so hardly used? They say now-a-days that thy bluff lord was a worthy man, a good husband, and only anxious for his kingdom's good. Well, perhaps he was, but prejudice and thy story are against the supposition.

Listen, that is the voice of blue-eyed Desdemona; hear what she sings

"The poor soul sat sighing by a sycamore tree,

Sing all a green willow;

Her hand on her bosom, her head on her knee,

Sing willow, willow, willow."

Dear, pure-souled lady, how truly spoke another of thy fellowdwellers in the ideal world: "Be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny." Thy life was faithful to the swarthy Moor as ever was that of the mother to her darling child, and yet the lying lips, the false tongue did thee to death.

Hark to Portia's merry laughter, as she reminds Bassanio of the caskets and the perilous choice; and see how grim old Shylock glowers at them, and keeps mumbling about his "ducats and his daughter."

But enough of the ideal world: the Master rises and beckons to us; let us follow where he leads. Here we are among the busy, noisy streets; not noisy with omnibuses, and rolling traffic of every kind as now; no railway whistles, nor great viaducts over the roadway, but quaint overhanging, gable-ended houses with shops undefended by glass windows, and their wares exposed to the public day. The flat-cap tribe of 'prentices are bawling lustily their never vayring cry of "What d'ye lack, what d'ye lack?" There is a cutler selling a damascus blade to a courtier with yellow roses in his shoes; and yonder at the corner is a broom-seller singing his song:

Here a great Lord is going by on horseback; it is my Lord of Leices ter, handsome, false Dudley, the idol of stiff-ruffed Queen Elizabeth. For shame, my Lord Earl, does your heart not smite you when you think of a certain lovely lady mourning for you in lonely Cumnor Place? Some wise men in later times have discovered that such a lady as Amy Robsart

never lived or died at Cumnor. Well, let the infidels enjoy their notion ; we will think as our fathers thought. The Queen is at Whitehall, but we will not go thither, her Majesty is too formidable a hostess for humble wanderers like us.

We will not turn into the bear-baiting at Southwark; it is poor sport to see Bruin bitten and worried by the cowardly curs. Let us rather turn into the Globe Theatre, and see the gallants sitting on the stage; we can do it too for a shilling. There are Raleigh, and gifted Philip Sidney who wrote "Arcadia," sitting with their feet among the green rushes which strew the stage.

The play is over, the actors gone, and we go out with the crowd. We have had a glimpse, a very slight one, of the world of Shakespeare; we must leave it now, reluctantly; and as we find ourselves, as if by magic, among the sights and scenes of the nineteenth century, we look regretfully after the fading figure of the Master, and sighing say,

"He was a man, take him for all in all,
We shall not look upon his like again."

HESPERUS.

150

CLYTEMNESTRA.

PAUSE, pale Ægisthus, stay thy fateful hand,
Not thine the deed of horror. Far too weak
Thy palsied hand for such a work of blood.
Know'st thou for whom the cold bright blade is bare?
See, 'tis his room the warrior king of men,

His shield hangs there, rough with the dents of war,
Hard by, the spear late red with Ilium's gore,
And that great sword all dight with precious gems
Washed in a thousand baptisms of blood.

Pause, pale Ægisthus, see, the curtain stirs,,
He comes, whose eye ne'er blenched at living foe,
Once lord of her, the lily-cheeked, the fair,
Old Chryses' child, the dearly loved and lost;
He comes, the first in council as in war,
The Prince of fertile Argos, first of men.

Pause, pale Ægisthus, tremble and be still.
Think of thy ill-famed birth, thy mother's shame,
Thy youth full-fed with murder, and the cry
Of hapless Atreus slaughtered by thy hand;
Think on Thyestes' fiendish festival,

So frightful, that the bright, all-seeing Sun
Turned from his course in horror on that day,
And gave no light to men.

Pause, pale Ægisthus, tremble and be still.
Whose are those baleful eyes, so tiger-like,
Which gleam from out the darkness of the room?
Whose is that shapely arm, so marble white
Which twines round pale Ægisthus serpent-wise,
And plucks the dagger from his nerveless hand?
'Tis thine stern Clytemnestra, beautiful

-one blow!

As some sleek panther couching for his prey.
Fill up the measure of thy many sins,
Fill up the blood-red goblet to the brim.
Thy outraged Lord stands powerless,-
How deftly struck, how pitiless those eyes!
Was that Cassandra's shriek! Hark, yet again,
That wailing cry above the Palaces!

Ah, no! Cassandra's fateful voice is still,
The hand of murder red upon her breast.
And yet again that wailing warning cry!
It is the Atè of that cursed House

Sounding its note of ruin to the skies,
Calling her sister Furies to her side,

With black-brow'd Vengeance panting for her prey.

W. B.

LIGHT AND SHADE.

BY GEORGE MANVILLE FENN.

SOME years ago, a certain company in London, used to commence their advertisements with the words, "No home without a stereoscope;" and among other wise people, I took care that my home should not lack this appendage. As a matter of course, the stereoscope introduced slides, and the slides a demand for more; and, not as a matter of course, but from the inward pressure of a whim, I took to photography, and from the many pretty bits of scenery in my neighbourhood managed to supply myself with plenty of home-made slides; but at a pecuniary cost that I never thought it worth while to mention to the "old folks at home."

A very pleasant science is photography-a nice light pursuit; there is something so unique in focussing a landscape: stuffing your head under a black cloth, and coming out again with face red-hot, and hair rough and tangled, as if you had just risen from your early couch. And then, too, there are all the pleasures and troubles of the bath, with all its acid, alkaline, and fogging propensities. Then again, the developing, fixing, printing, etc.; hands stained with nitrate of silver, and the pleasant risk of cyanide of potassium entering into any little crack or scratch in your skin, and entailing serious consequences-consequences that, a chemist once told me with a pleasant smile upon his countenance, might prove fatal. However, photography introduced me to Philip Longrange, and such characters are only encountered once in a life-time.

I belonged to a stereoscopic club; and the custom of each individual member was, to exchange slides with all his fellows; and as the members resided in all parts of the kingdom, we managed to turn our own same multiplied copies into a large and extensive variety at the cost of a few stamps for postage. Exchanging prints with Longrange led to correspondence-correspondence led to artistic trips-the trips led to visits; and so, on the strength of a twelvemonth's acquaintanceship, I called upon him one day, and hearing from the servant that he was in the studio, as he called his operating room, I walked up to the first floor, and from thence out on to the leads and into his glass room, where I found him in company with a friend, busy at work colouring a tremendous meerschaum pipe. The visitor was seated in a show chair that Phil kept for his carte de visite friends—a sham-antique affair, with a red velvet seat; and, as the auctioneers say, a ditto pincushion in the carved back. It was a rowdy looking chair and seemed for all the world as though it had been brought up in the chancel of a church, but had since turned dissipated and run into rakish habits. The host himself was seated upon a very fragile