which his spirit is at home, he has yet retained his Oriental character. Passion is the kernel of his nature. It is his passion that has enriched him; he is passionate in action, in calculation, in sensation, in hatred, in revenge, in everything. His vengefulness is many times greater than his rapacity. Avaricious though he be, money is nothing to him in comparison with revenge. It is not until he is exasperated by his daughter's robbery and flight that he takes such hard measures against Antonio, and refuses to accept three times the amount of the loan. His conception of honour may be unchivalrous enough, but, such as it is, his honour is not to be bought for money. His hatred of Antonio is far more intense than his love for his jewels; and it is this passionate hatred, not avarice, that makes him the monster he becomes.

From this Hebrew passionateness, which can be traced even in details of diction, arises, among other things, his loathing of sloth and idleness. To realise how essentially Jewish is this trait we need only refer to the so-called Proverbs of Solomon. Shylock dismisses Launcelot with the words, "Drones hive not with me." Oriental, rather than specially Jewish, are the images in which he gives his passion utterance, approaching, as they so often do, to the parable form. (See, for example, his appeal to Jacob's cunning, or the speech in vindication of his claim, which begins, "You have among you many a purchased slave.") Specially Jewish, on the other hand, is the way in which this ardent passion throughout employs its images and parables in the service of a curiously sober rationalism, so that a sharp and biting logic, which retorts every accusation with interest, is always the controlling force. This sober logic, moreover, never lacks dramatic impetus. Shylock's course of thought perpetually takes the form of question and answer, a subordinate but characteristic trait which appears in the style of the Old Testament, and reappears to this day in representations of primitive Jews. One can feel through his words that there is a chanting quality in his voice; his movements are rapid, his gestures large. Externally and internally, to the inmost fibre of his being, he is a type of his race in its degradation.

Shylock disappears with the end of the fourth act in order that no discord may mar the harmony of the concluding scenes. By means of his fifth act, Shakespeare dissipates any preponderance of pain and gloom in the general impression of the play.

This act is a moonlit landscape thrilled with music. It is altogether given over to music and moonshine. It is an image of Shakespeare's soul at that point of time. Everything is here reconciled, assuaged, silvered over, and borne aloft upon the wings of music.

The speeches melt into each other like voices in part-singing:

"Lorenzo. The moon shines bright.-In such a night as this,
When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees,
And they did make no noise, in such a night,
Troilus, methinks, mounted the Trojan walls,
And sigh'd his soul toward the Grecian tents,
Where Cressid lay that night.

Jessica.

In such a night

Did Thisbe fearfully o'ertrip the dew;

Lor.

In such a night

Stood Dido with a willow in her hand;"

and so on for four more speeches-the very poetry of moonlight arranged in antiphonies.

The conclusion of The Merchant of Venice brings us to the threshold of a term in Shakespeare's life instinct with highpitched gaiety and gladness. In this, his brightest period, he fervently celebrates strength and wisdom in man, intellect and wit in woman; and these most brilliant years of his life are also the most musical. His poetry, his whole existence, seem now to be given over to music, to harmony.

He had been early familiar with the art of music, and must have heard much music in his youth. Even in his earliest plays, such as The Two Gentlemen of Verona, we find a considerable insight into musical technique, as in the conversation between Julia and Lucetta (i. 2). He must often have heard the Queen's choir, and the choirs maintained by noble lords and ladies, like that which Portia has in her palace. And he no doubt heard much music performed in private. The English were in his day, what they have never been since, a musical people. It was the Puritans who cast out music from the daily life of England. The spinet was the favourite instrument of the time. Spinets stood in the barbers' shops, for the use of customers waiting their turn.

1 Förster: Shakespeare und die Tonkunst, Shakespeare -Jahrbuch, ii. 155; Karl Elze: William Shakespeare, p. 474; Henrik Schück: William Shakespere, p. 313.

Elizabeth herself played on the spinet and the lute. In his Sonnet cxxviii., addressed to the lady whom he caressingly calls "my music," Shakespeare has described himself as standing beside his mistress's spinet and envying the keys which could kiss her fingers. In all probability he was personally acquainted with John Dowland, the chief English musician of the time, although the poem in which he is named, published as Shakespeare's in The Passionate Pilgrim, is not by him, but by Richard Barnfield.

In The Taming of the Shrew (iii. 1), written just before The Merchant of Venice, he had utilised his knowledge of singing and lute-playing in a scene of gay comedy. "The cause why music was ordained," says Lucentio

"Was it not to refresh the mind of man,
After his studies, or his usual pain?"

Its influence upon mental disease was also known to Shakespeare, and noted both in King Lear and in The Tempest. But here, in The Merchant of Venice, where music is wedded to moonlight, his praise of it takes a higher flight :

"How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!
Here we will sit, and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears: soft stillness, and the night,
Become the touches of sweet harmony."

And Shakespeare, who never mentions church music, which seems to have had no message for his soul, here makes the usually unimpassioned Lorenzo launch out into genuine Renaissance rhapsodies upon the music of the spheres:

"Sit, Jessica: look, how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold.

There's not the smallest orb, which thou behold'st,
But in his motion like an angel sings,

Still quiring to the young-ey'd cherubins;

Such harmony is in immortal souls;

But, whilst this muddy vesture of decay

Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it."

Sphere-harmony and soul-harmony, not bell-ringing or psalmsinging, are for him the highest music.

Shakespeare's love of music, so incomparably expressed in

the last scenes of The Merchant of Venice, appears at other points. in the play. Thus Portia says, when Bassanio is about to make his choice between the caskets (iii. 2):

"Let music sound, while he doth make his choice;

Then, if he lose, he makes a swan-like end,

Fading in music.

He may win;

And what is music then? then music is

Even as the flourish when true subjects bow

To a new-crowned monarch."

It seems as though Shakespeare, in this play, had set himself to reveal for the first time how deeply his whole nature was penetrated with musical feeling. He places in the mouth of the frivolous Jessica these profound words, "I am never merry when I hear sweet music." And he makes Lorenzo answer, "The reason is, your spirits are attentive." The note of the trumpet, he says, will calm a wanton herd of "unhandled colts;" and Orpheus, as poets feign, drew trees and stones and floods to follow him:

"Since nought so stockish, hard, and full of rage,
But music for the time doth change his nature.
The man that hath no music in himself,

Nor is not mov'd with concord of sweet sounds,

Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils ;

The motions of his spirit are dull as night,

And his affections dark as Erebus.

Let no such man be trusted.-Mark the music."

This must not, of course, be taken too literally. But note the characters whom Shakespeare makes specially unmusical: in this play, Shylock, who loathes "the vile squeaking of the wry-necked fife;" then Hotspur, the hero-barbarian; Benedick, the wouldbe woman-hater; Cassius, the fanatic politician; Othello, the half-civilised African; and finally creatures like Caliban, who are nevertheless enthralled by music as though by a wizard's spell.

On the other hand, all his more delicate creations are musical. In the First Part of Henry IV. (iii. 1) we have Mortimer and his Welsh wife, who do not understand each other's speech:

"But I will never be a truant, love,

Till I have learn'd thy language; for thy tongue
Makes Welsh as sweet as ditties highly penn'd,
Sung by a fair queen in a summer's bower,
With ravishing division, to her lute."

Musical, too, are the pathetic heroines, such as Ophelia and Desdemona, and characters like Jaques in As You Like It, and the Duke and Viola in Twelfth Night. The last-named comedy, indeed, is entirely interpenetrated with music. The keynote of musical passion is struck in the opening speech :

"If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.—
That strain again! it had a dying fall:

O! it came o'er my ear like the sweet south
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour."

Here, too, Shakespeare's love of the folk-song finds expression, when he makes the Duke say (ii. 4) :—

"Now, good Cesario, but that piece of song,

That old and antique song, we heard last night;
Methought, it did relieve my passion much,
More than light airs, and recollected terms,
Of these most brisk and giddy-paced times:
Come; but one verse."

No less sensitive and devoted to music than the Duke in Twelfth Night or Lorenzo in The Merchant of Venice must their creator himself have been in the short and happy interval in which, as yet unmastered by the melancholy latent in his as in all deep natures, he felt his talents strengthening and unfolding, his life every day growing fuller and more significant, his inmost soul quickening with creative impulse and instinct with harmony. The rich concords which bring The Merchant of Venice to a close symbolise, as it were, the feeling of inward wealth and equipoise to which he had now attained.