The pox of such antick, lisping, affecting fantasticoes, these new tuners of accents! . these strange flies, these fashion-mongers, these pardonnez mois, who stand so much on the new form that they cannot sit at ease on the old bench.

Mercutio scorns these water-flies. He had added the sturdy sense of the Englishman to the rippling gaiety of the Italian. More than wit belongs to him. There is a touch of genius in his soul, and a single grain of that rarity makes its possessor loveable. Even in the midst of Romeo's new passion he loves Mercutio. Benvolio weeps for him

That gallant spirit hath aspir'd the clouds.

Romeo avenges him, swept away by grief to forget for an instant his love of Juliet.-BROOKE, On Ten Plays of Shakespeare.

TYBALT

Tybalt is not, though his ill-temper makes him seem so, a swashbuckler, or a bully. He is the quick-offended duelist of the day, one of those whom the French court called the raffinés; hot to challenge a smile, a motion of the hand, but a gentleman quite fit to rank with Benvolio and Mercutio. Like the rest, he is as ready to die as to live. Unlike Benvolio, who is good-temper personified; unlike Romeo, who is quiet by nature; unlike Mercutio, who is good-humored, but touchy on the point of honor; Tybalt is of a natural bad temper, quarrelsome, liable to fits of fury. When Capulet, who is as hot as he, bids him lay by his rage at Romeo's appearance in his house, and forces peace upon him, his body trembles;

Patience perforce with willful choler meeting

Makes my flesh tremble in their different greeting.

"A king of cats," Mercutio calls him. He slays Mercutio. Romeo, lashed into wrath, slays him. He is the second victim of the event; the second step by which Justice marches through blood to her fixed purpose. His death,

more than Mercutio's, hurries up the catastrophe. Owing to it, Romeo is banished, and Juliet left alone. Owing to it, Capulet forces the County Paris on Juliet. Owing to that, Juliet takes the drug and is thought by Romeo to have died, and Romeo resolves on death.-BROOKE, On Ten Plays of Shakespeare.

FRIAR LAURENCE

Between the lovers and the haters Shakespeare has placed Friar Laurence, one of his most delightful embodiments of reason. Such figures are rare in his plays, as they are in life, but ought not to be overlooked, as they have been, for example, by Taine in his somewhat one-sided estimate of Shakespeare's greatness. Shakespeare knows and understands passionlessness; but he always places it on the second plane. It comes in very naturally here, in the person of one who is obliged by his age and his calling to act as an onlooker in the drama of life. Friar Laurence is full of goodness and natural piety, a monk such as Spinoza or Goethe would have loved, an undogmatic sage, with the astuteness and benevolent Jesuitism of an old confessor-brought up on the milk and bread of philosophy, not on the fiery liquors of religious fanaticism.

It is very characteristic of the freedom of spirit which Shakespeare early acquired, in the sphere in which freedom was then hardest of attainment, that this monk is drawn with so delicate a touch, without the smallest ill-will towards conquered Catholicism, yet without the smallest leaning towards Catholic doctrine-the emancipated creation of an emancipated poet.-BRANDES, William Shakespeare.

A PICTURE OF HUMAN LIFE

We have heard it objected to Romeo and Juliet, that it is founded on an idle passion between a boy and a girl, who have scarcely seen and can have but little sympathy or rational esteem for one another, who have had no experi

ence of the good or ills of life, and whose raptures or despair must be therefore equally groundless and fantastical. Whoever objects to the youth of the parties in this play as "too unripe and crude" to pluck the sweets of love, and wishes to see a first-love carried on into a good old age, and the passions taken at the rebound, when their force is spent, may find all this done in the Stranger and in other German plays, where they do things by contraries, and transpose nature to inspire sentiment and create philosophy. Shakespear proceeded in a more straight-forward, and, we think, effectual way. He did not endeavor to extract beauty from wrinkles, or the wild throb of passion from the last expiring sigh of indifference. He did not "gather grapes of thorns nor figs of thistles." It was not his way. But he has given a picture of human life, such as it is in the order of nature. He has founded the passion of the two lovers not on the pleasures they had experienced, but on all the pleasures they had not experienced. All that was to come of life was theirs. At that untried source of promised happiness they slaked their thirst, and the first eager draught made them drunk with love and joy. They were in full possession of their senses and their affections. Their hopes were of air, their desires of fire. Youth is the season of love, because the heart is then first melted in tenderness from the touch of novelty, and kindled to rapture, for it knows no end of its enjoyments or its wishes. Desire has no limit but itself. Passion, the love and expectation of pleasure, is infinite, extravagant, inexhaustible, till experience comes to check and kill it. Juliet exclaims on her first interview with Romeo

"My bounty is as boundless as the sea,

My love as deep."

And why should it not? What was to hinder the thrilling tide of pleasure, which had just gushed from her heart, from flowing on without stint or measure, but experience which she was yet without? What was to abate the trans

port of the first sweet sense of pleasure, which her heart and her senses had just tasted, but indifference which she was yet a stranger to? What was there to check the ardor of hope, of faith, of constancy, just rising in her breast, but disappointment which she had not yet felt! As are the desires and the hopes of youthful passion, such is the keenness of its disappointments, and their baleful effect. Such is the transition in this play from the highest bliss to the lowest despair, from the nuptial couch to an untimely grave. The only evil that even in apprehension befalls the two lovers is the loss of the greatest possible felicity; yet this loss is fatal to both, for they had rather part with life than bear the thought of surviving all that had made life dear to them. In all this, Shakespear has but followed nature, which existed in his time, as well as now. The modern philosophy, which reduces the whole theory of the mind to habitual impressions, and leaves the natural impulses of passion and imagination out of the account, had not then been discovered; or if it had, would have been little calculated for the uses of poetry.-HAZLITT, Characters of Shakespear's Plays.

THE KEY TO THE ACTION

From out of the very midst of the deadly enmity of the parents, there arises the consuming love of the children, extremes meet, not accidentally, but by reason of their inmost nature. The transgression of the moral law, which lies in the irreconcilable hatred of the parents, takes its revenge upon the children, and through them again upon the parents themselves. For the destructive element in hate exists also in love-in spite of the contradiction— for both are one in passion. Regarded in this light, even the foundation upon which the whole play is based, manifests an internal necessity which determines its structure, and which has its seat in human nature itself.

This tragic contrariety is the key to the tragic action in all its essential features. The tragic conflict of the

rights and duties is given: on the one side we have Romeo's and Juliet's love in the full justice of its ideal beauty, their marriage as a necessary demand of this love, not as a merely subjective, but as an objective moral necessityfor marriage ought to be desired where there is genuine and sincere love on the other side we have the equally justified right of the parents, the sacred sphere of the family bond, which cannot be broken with impunity. Accordingly, right and wrong are so interwoven with one another, that the right of the lovers is, at the same time, a wrong, their secret marriage both a moral and an immoral proceeding. The task of the tragic action is to solve this contradiction. The first five or six scenes therefore, in the first place, exhibit the problem clearly and distinctly, they elucidate and build up the foundation, and also intimate the positions of the dramatic characters toward one another. In Shakspeare's usual manner, definite groups detach and arrange themselves according to the degree of their importance. In the center stand Romeo and Juliet with their love, behind, assisting and influencing them, stand Friar Laurence and the Nurse; on one side the Montagues and their adherents, Mercutio and Benvolio; on the other, the ruder passionateness of the Capulets, with Tybalt and Count Paris; but above them all, and yet in the background, stands the Prince, the representative of the general power of right and morality, who has to protect the ethical, whole-the state-against the disturbing attacks of its various members. These groups-every one of which bears within itself a principal motive in the development of the action-then advance towards one another, each coming forward alternately, and thus carry the action forward to its catastrophe entirely of their own accord (each being engaged in the pursuit of its special interests). ULRICI, Shakespeare's Dramatic Art.