send them to sunshine and green fields, to wander in gardens among birds and flowers, and soothe them with soft music and kind, flattering speech. ALDA. You laugh at me! perhaps I deserve it. MEDON. No, in truth; I am a little amused, but most honestly attentive and perhaps wish I could think more like But to proceed: I allow that with this view of the case you I could not well have chosen your illustrations from real life: but why not from history? you. ALDA. As far as History could guide me, I have taken her with me in one or two recent publications, which all tend to the same object. Nor have I here lost sight of her; but I have entered on a land where she alone is not to be trusted, and may make a pleasant companion but a most fallacious guide. To drop metaphor: history informs us that such things have been done or have occurred; but when we come to inquire into motives and characters, it is the most false and partial and unsatisfactory authority we can refer to. Women are illustrious in history, not from what they have been in themselves, but generally in proportion to the mischief they have done or caused. Those characters best fitted to my purpose are precisely those of which history never heard, or disdains to speak; of those which have been handed down to us by many different authorities under different aspects we cannot judge without prejudice; in others there occur certain chasms which it is difficult to supply: and hence inconsistencies we have no means of reconciling, though doubtless: they might be reconciled, if we knew the whole instead of a part. MEDON. But instance-instance ! ALDA. Examples crowd upon me; but take the first that occurs. Do you remember that Duchesse de Longueville whose beautiful picture we were looking at yesterday?—the heroine of the Fronde ?-think of that woman-bold, intriguing, profligate, vain, ambitious, factious!-who made men rebels with a smile;—or if that were not enough, the lady was not scrupulous,— apparently without principle as without shame, nothing was too much! And then think of the same woman protecting the virtuous philosopher Arnauld, when he was denounced and condemned; and, from motives which her worst enemies could not malign, secreting him in her house, unknown even to her own servantspreparing his food herself, watching for his safety, and at length saving him. Her tenderness, her patience, her discretion, her disinterested benevolence, not only defied danger (that were little to a woman of her temper), but endured a lengthened trial; all the ennui caused by the necessity of keeping her house, continual self-control, and the thousand small daily sacrifices which to a vain, dissipated, proud, impatient woman, must have been hard to bear. Now if Shakspeare had drawn the character of the Duchesse de Longueville, he would have shown us the same individual woman in both situations:-for the same being, with the same faculties and passions and powers, it surely was: whereas in history we see, in one case, a fury of dis cord, a woman without modesty or pity; and in the other, an angel of benevolence and a worshipper of goodness; and nothing to connect the two extremes in our fancy. MEDON. But these are contradictions which we meet on every page of history, which make us giddy with doubt or sick with belief; and are the proper subjects of inquiry for the moralist and the philosopher. ALDA. I cannot say that professed moralists and philosophers did much to help me out of the dilemma; but the riddle which history presented I found solved in the pages of Shakspeare. There the crooked appeared straight; the inaccessible, easy; the incomprehensible, plain. All I sought, I found there; his characters combine history and real life; they are complete individuals, whose hearts and souls are laid open before us: all may behold, and all judge for themselves. MEDON. But all will not judge alike. ALDA. No; and herein lies a part of their wonderful truth. We hear Shakspeare's men and women discussed, praised and dispraised, liked, disliked, as real human beings; and in forming our opinions of them we are influenced by our own characters, habits of thought, prejudices, feelings, impulses, just as we are influenced with regard to our acquaintances and associates. MEDON. But we are then as likely to misconceive and misjudge them. ALDA. Yes, if we had only the same imperfect means of studying them. But we can do with them what we cannot do with real people: we can unfold the whole character before us, stripped of all pretensions of selflove, all disguises of manner. We can take leisure to examine, to analyse, to correct our own impressions, to watch the rise and progress of various passions—we can hate, love, approve, condemn, without offence to others, without pain to ourselves. MEDON. In this respect they may be compared to those exquisite anatomical preparations of wax, which those who could not without disgust and horror dissect a real specimen, may study, and learn the mysteries of our frame, and all the internal workings of the wondrous machine of life. And it is the safer and the better way-for us at least. But look, that brilliant rain-drop trembling there in the sunshine suggests to me another illustration. Passion, when we contemplate it through the medium of imagination, is like a ray of light transmitted through a prism; we can calmly, and with undazzled eye, study its complicate nature and analyse its variety of tints; but passion brought home to us in its reality, through our own feelings and experience, is like the same ray transmitted through a lens,— blinding, burning, consuming where it falls. MEDON. Your illustration is the most poetical, I allow; but not the most just. But tell me, is the ground you have taken sufficiently large?—is the foundation you have chosen strong enough to bear the moral superstructure you raise upon it? You know the prevalent idea is, that Shakspeare's women are inferior to his men. This assertion is constantly repeated, and has been but tamely refuted. ALDA. Professor Richardson ?— MEDON. He is as dry as a stick, and his refutation not successful even as a piece of logic. Then it is not sufficient for critics to assert this inferiority and want of variety they first assume the fallacy, then argue upon it. Cibber accounts for it from the circumstance that all the female parts in Shakspeare's time were acted by boys-there were no women on the stage; and Mackenzie, who ought to have known better, says that he was not so happy in his delineations of love and tenderness, as of the other passions; because, forsooth, the majesty of his genius could not stoop to the refinements of delicacy;-preposterous! ALDA. Stay! before we waste epithets of indignation, let us consider. If these people mean that Shakspeare's women are inferior in power to his men, I grant it at once; for in Shakspeare the male and female characters bear precisely the same relation to each other that they do in nature and in society-they are not equal in |