without explicit mention of the myth referred to. It would strike us as incongruous were the serving-man, Adam, to refer more definitely to the poisoned shirt of Nessus; but we are aware of no incongruity when, impressed by the fact that it is the virtues of Orlando which inflame his brother against him, he exclaims:

O, what a world is this, when what is comely
Envenoms him that bears it!1 ́

Of a similar character is Duke Orsino's veiled allusion to the hounds of Acteon:

O, when mine eyes did see Olivia first,
Methought she purged the air of pestilence!
That instant was I turn'd into a hart;

And my desires, like fell and cruel hounds,
E'er since pursue me.'

With unspeakable pathos, King Lear awakes from his long slumber, and imagining that he is dead and in hell, compares himself to Ixion on the wheel:

You do me wrong to take me out o' the grave:
Thou art a soul in bliss; but I am bound

Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears
Do scald like molten lead.'

I am inclined to think, however, that the aspect of mythology which appealed most deeply to Shakespeare, which he most fully and vitally incorporated into his own thoughts, is that original aspect of the system which gives a divine personality to the great forces of nature. The sun in its rising and its setting, the 'gray-eyed dawn' and the 'blackbrowed night'; the procession of the seasons from 'wellapparelled April' to 'old Hiems' with his 'thin and icy crown'; 'Great Neptune's ocean' and the 'mutinous winds'; the crash of Jove's dread thunderbolt-to express his appreciation of all these, Shakespeare has constant recourse to the 'Tw. I. I. 19-23. 'Lr. 4. 7. 45-48.

'As 2. 3. 14-15.

forms of expression given us by the ancients, or, still more significantly, imitates their methods of thought without employing their exact terms. How thoroughly in accord with the spirit of mythology are Hotspur's words describing the fight between Mortimer and Glendower:

Three times they breathed and three times did they drink,
Upon agreement, of swift Severn's flood;

Who then, affrighted with their bloody looks,
Ran fearfully among the trembling reeds,
And hid his crisp head in the hollow bank
Bloodstained with these valiant combatants.'

Or again the simile in King John 3. 1. 23:
Like a proud river peering o'er his bounds.

There is the germ of a whole myth in the lines:

So looks the strand whereon the imperious flood
Hath left a witness'd usurpation.'

Not only the war of the sea against the shore, but the ceaseless encounters of the sea and winds, 'old wranglers' (Troil. 2. 2. 75), takes on a personal aspect:

Mad as the sea and wind, when both contend

Which is the mightier.

And in the visitation of the winds,

Who take the ruffian billows by the top,

Curling their monstrous heads and hanging them

With deafening clamor in the slippery clouds."

Macbeth suggests that the witches may 'untie the winds, and let them fight against the churches,' and in another passage calls the winds 'sightless couriers of the air.'

Plato has told us that it is the work of the gods to bring order out of chaos; and so it is with the most godlike of men-philosophers, poets, artists; it must ever be their glory that they know how to transcend the conditions in which they

'H4A 1. 3. 102-107. 'H4B 3. 1. 21-4.

'H4B 1. 1. 62-3.
4. I. 52-3.

'Hml. 4. 1. 7-8.

1. 7. 23.

live, to compel these conditions, hostile and discordant, into order and fair harmony, to impress the crude and stubborn material about them with the divine mark of the spiritual. It was so that Shakespeare compelled the conditions placed upon him by the dramatic traditions of his day; it was so, in a wider sense, that he took up into himself the rich and varied but discordant life of the Renaissance, and gave to it some of that order and spiritual harmony which is the glory of the greatest of mediæval art. It is this habit of thought and power of soul that seem to me evident in his treatment of the classical mythology. He did not know the great mythographers of Hellas, and was, in consequence, cut off from the sublimer aspects of their system; but from the mythology of Ovid and Vergil he was able to draw the poetic beauties which it offers, and while recognizing its limitations, to seek, not without success, for the deeper spiritual significance which it implies.

(These abbreviations are, with slight variations, those used by Schmidt in his