According to an entry in the books of the Stationers' Company for 1560, the preacher was paid six shillings and two pence for his labour; the minstrel twelve shillings; and the cook fifteen shillings. The relative scale of estimation for theology, poetry, and gastronomy, has not been much altered during two centuries, either in the city generally, or in the Company which represents the city's literature. Ben Jonson has described a master cook in his gorgeous style :

"A master cook! why, he is the man of men.
For a professor; he designs, he draws,

He paints, he carves, he builds, he fortifies,
Makes citadels of curious fowl and fish.

Some he dry-ditches, some motes round with broths,
Mounts marrow-bones, cuts fifty angled custards,
Rears bulwark pies; and, for his outer works,
He raiseth ramparts of immortal crust,
And teacheth all the tactics at one dinner-
What ranks, what files, to put his dishes in,
The whole art military! Then he knows
The influence of the stars upon his meats,
And all their seasons, tempers, qualities,
And so to fit his relishes and sauces.

He has nature in a pot, 'bove all the chemists,
Or bare-breech'd brethren of the rosy cross.
He is an architect, an engineer,

A soldier, a physician, a philosopher,
A general mathematician."

Old Capulet, in his exuberant spirits at his daughter's approaching marriage, calls for "twenty" of these artists. The critics think this too large a number. Ritson says, with wonderful simplicity, "Either Capulet had altered his mind strangely, or our author forgot what he had just made him tell us." This is, indeed, to understand a poet with admirable exactness. The passage is entirely in keeping with Shakspere's habit of hitting off a character almost by a word. Capulet is evidently a man of ostentation; but his ostentation, as is most generally the case, is covered with a thin veil of affected indifference. In the first Act he says to his guests,

"We have a trifling foolish banquet toward." In the third Act, when he settles the day of Paris' marriage, he just hints,

"We'll keep no great ado-a friend or two." But Shakspere knew that these indications of the "pride which apes humility" were not inconsistent with the "twenty cooks," the regret that

"We shall be much unfurnish'd for this time," and the solicitude expressed in

"Look to the bak'd meats, good Angelica."

Steevens turns up his nose aristocratically at Shakspere, for imputing "to an Italian nobleman and his lady all the petty solicitudes of a private house, concerning a provincial entertainment;" and he adds, very grandly, "To such a bustle our author might have been witness at home; but the like anxieties could not well have occurred in the family of Capulet." Steevens had not well read the history of society, either in Italy or in England, to have fallen into the mistake of believing that the great were exempt from such "anxieties." The baron's lady overlooked the baron's kitchen from her private chamber; and the still-room and the spicery not unfrequently occupied a large portion of her attention.

the audience know that Juliet is not dead, this scene is, perhaps, excusable." Rightly understood, it appears to us that the scene requires no apology. It was the custom of our ancient theatre to introduce, in the irregular pauses of a play that stood in the place of a division into acts, some short diversion, such as a song, a dance, or the extempore buffoonery of a clown. At this point of 'Romeo and Juliet' there is a natural pause in the action, and at this point such an interlude would, probably, have been presented whether Shakspere had written one or not. The stage direction in the second quarto puts this matter, as it appears to us, beyond a doubt. That direction says, "Enter Will Kempe," and the dialogue immediately begins between Peter and the musicians. Will Kempe was the Liston of his day; and was as great a popular favourite as Tarleton had been before him. It was wise, therefore, in Shakspere to find some business for Will Kempe, that should not be entirely out of harmony with the great business of his play. This scene of the musicians is very short, and, regarded as a necessary part of the routine of the ancient stage, is excellently managed. Nothing can be more naturally exhibited than the indifference of hirelings, without attachment, to a family-scene

of grief. Peter and the musicians bandy jokes; and, although the musicians think Peter a "pestilent knave," perhaps for his inopportune sallies, they are ready enough to look after their own gratification, even amidst the sorrow which they see around them. A wedding or a burial is the same to them. "Come, we'll in here: tarry for the mourners, and stay dinner." So Shakspere read the course of the world—and it is not much changed. The quotation beginning"When griping griefs the heart doth wound"is from a short poem in 'The Paradise of Daintie Deuises,' by Richard Edwards, master of the children of the chapel to Queen Elizabeth. This was set as a four-part song, by Adrian Batten, organist of St. Paul's in the reign of Charles I., and is thus printed, but without any name, in Hawkins's History of Music,' vol. v. The question of Peter, "Why, silver sound, why, music with her silver sound?" is happily enough explained by Percy: "This ridicule is not so much levelled at the song itself (which, for the time it was written, is not inelegant) as at those forced and unnatural explanations often given by us painful editors and expositors of ancient authors."-(Reliques,' vol. i.) Had Shakspere a presentiment of what he was to receive at the hands of his own commentators?

51 To the poetical traveller it would be difficult to say whether Mantua would excite the greater interest as the birth-place of Virgil or as the scene of Romeo's exile. Surely, an Englishman cannot walk through the streets of that city without thinking of the apothecary in whose

"needy shop a tortoise hung,

An alligator stuff'd, and other skins

Of ill-shap'd fishes; and about his shelves A beggarly account of empty boxes." Any description of the historical events connected with Mantua, or any account of its architectural monuments, would here be out of place.

52 SCENE I.-"I do remember an apothecary." The criticism of the French school has not spared this famous passage. Joseph Warton, an elegant scholar, but who belonged to this school, has the following observations in his Virgil (1763, vol. i. page 301) :—

"It may not be improper to produce the following glaring instance of the absurdity of introducing long and minute descriptions into tragedy. When Romeo receives the dreadful and unexpected news of Juliet's death, this fond husband, in an agony of grief, immediately resolves to poison himself. But his sorrow is interrupted, while he gives us an exact picture of the apothecary's shop from whom he intended to purchase the poison.

'I do remember an apothecary,' &c.

"I appeal to those who know anything of the human heart, whether Romeo, in this distressful situation, could have leisure to think of the alligator, empty boxes, and bladders, and other furniture of this beggarly shop, and to point them out so distinctly to the audience. The description is, indeed, very lively and natural, but very improperly put into the mouth of a person agitated with such passion as Romeo is represented to be."

The criticism of Warton, ingenious as it may appear, and true as applied to many "long and minute descriptions in tragedy," is here based upon a wrong principle. He says that Romeo, in his distressful situation, had not "leisure" to think of the furniture of the apothecary's shop. What then had he leisure to do? Had he leisure to run off into declamations against fate, and

into tedious apostrophes and generalizations, as a less skilful artist than Shakspere would have made him indulge in? From the moment he had said,

"Well, Juliet, I will lie with thee to-night,-
Let's see for means,"

the apothecary's shop became to him the object of the most intense interest. Great passions, when they have shaped themselves into firm resolves, attach the most distinct importance to the minutest objects connected with the execution of their purpose. He had seen the apothecary's shop in his placid moments as an object of common curiosity. He had hastily looked at the tortoise and the alligator, the empty boxes, and the earthern pots; and he had looked at the tattered weeds and the overwhelming brows But he had also said, of their needy owner.

when he first saw these things,

"An if a man did need a poison now,

Whose sale is present death in Mantua,
Here lives a caitiff wretch would sell it him."

When he did need a poison, all these documents of the misery that was to serve him came with a double intensity upon his vision. The shaping of these things into words was not for the audience. It was not to produce "a long and minute description in tragedy" that had no foundation in the workings of nature. It was the very cunning of nature which produced this description. Mischief was, indeed, swift to enter into the thoughts of the desperate man; but the mind once made up, it took a perverse pleasure in going over every item of the circumstances that had suggested the means of mischief. All other thoughts had passed out of Romeo's mind. He had nothing left but to die; and everything

connected with the means of his death was

seized upon by his imagination with an energy that could only find relief in words.

Shakspere has exhibited the same knowledge of nature in his sad and solemn poem of 'The Rape of Lucrece,' where the injured wife, having resolved to wipe out her stain by death,

-"calls to mind where hangs a piece

Of skilful painting, made for Priam's Troy." She sees in that painting some fancied resemblance to her own position, and spends the

"So Lucrece set a-work, sad tales doth tell

To pencill'd pensiveness and colour'd sorrow;

She lends them words, and she their looks doth borrow."

It was the intense interest in his own resolve which made Romeo so minutely describe his apothecary. But that stage past, came the abstraction of his sorrow :

"What said my man, when my betossed soul
Did not attend him as we rode? I think

He told me Paris should have married Juliet."

Juliet was dead; and what mattered it to his "betossed soul" who she should have married?

"Well, Juliet, I will lie with thee to-night,"

was the sole thought that made him remember an "apothecary," and treat what his servant said as a "dream." Who but Shakspere could have given us the key to these subtle and delicate workings of the human heart?

3 SCENE I.-"Whose sale is present death in Mantua."

54 SCENE II.-"Going to find a bare-foot
brother out."

In the old poem of 'Romeus and Juliet' we have the following lines:

"Apace our friar John to Mantua hies;

And, for because in Italy it is a wonted guise,
That friars in the town should seldom walk alone,
But of their convent aye should be accompanied with

one

Of his profession."

Friar Laurence and his associates must be supposed to belong to the Franciscan order of friars. The good friar of the play, in his kindliness, his learning, and his inclination to mix with, and perhaps control, the affairs of the world, is no unapt representative of one of this distinguished order in their best days. Warton, in his ' History of English Poetry,' has described the learning, the magnificence, and the prodigious influence of this remarkable body. Friar Laurence was able to give to Romeo

"Adversity's sweet milk-philosophy."

"a divine, a ghostly confessor,

A sin absolver, and my friend profess'd;" but he was yet of the world. He married Romeo and his mistress, partly to gratify their love, and