Betwixt the constant red and mingled damask. There be some women, Silvius, had they mark'd him I love him not, nor hate him not; and yet I have more cause to hate him than to love him; .... logy for his own melancholy and his satirical vein, and the well-known speech on the stages of human life, the old song of " Blow, blow, thou winter's wind," Rosalind's description of the marks of a lover and of the progress of time with different persons, the picture of the snake wreathed round Oliver's neck while the lioness watches her sleeping prey, and Touchstone's lecture to the shepherd, his defence of cuckolds, and panegyric on the virtues of "an If."-All of these are familiar to the reader: there is one passage of equal delicacy and beauty which may have escaped him, and with it we shall close our account of AS YOU LIKE IT. It is Phebe's description of Ganimed at the end of the third act. "Think not I love him, tho' I ask for him ; But sure he's proud, and yet his pride becomes him ; Did make offence, his eye did heal it up: He is not very tall, yet for his years he's tall; There was a pretty redness in his lip, A little riper, and more lusty red Betwixt the constant red and mingled damask. There be some women, Silvius, had they mark'd him I love him not, nor hate him not; and yet I have more cause to hate him than to love him; For what had he to do to chide at me?" THE TAMING OF THE SHREW. THE TAMING OF THE SHREW is almost the only one of Shakespear's comedies that has a regular plot, and downright moral. It is full of bustle, animation, and rapidity of action. It shews admirably how self-will is only to be got the better of by stronger will, and how one degree of ridiculous perversity is only to be driven out by another still greater. Petruchio is a madman in his senses; a very honest fellow, who hardly speaks a word of truth, and succeeds in all his tricks and impostures. He acts his assumed character to the life, with the most fantastical extravagance, with complete presence of mind, with untired animal spirits, and without a particle of ill humour from beginning to end. The situation of poor Katherine, worn out by his incessant persecutions, becomes at last almost as to say which to admire most, the unaccountableness of his actions, or the unalterableness of his resolutions. It is a character which most husbands ought to study, unless perhaps the very audacity of Petruchio's attempt might alarm them more than his success would encourage them. What a sound must the following speech carry to some married ears! "Think you a little din can daunt my ears? Loud larums, neighing steeds, and trumpets clang? That gives not half so great a blow to hear, As will a chesnut in a farmer's fire?" Not all Petruchio's rhetoric would persuade more than "some dozen followers" to be of this heretical way of thinking. He unfolds his scheme for the Taming of the Shrew, on a principle of contradiction, thus : "I'll woo her with some spirit when she comes. Say that she rail, why then I'll tell her plain She sings as sweetly as a nightingale; Say that she frown, I'll say she looks as clear As morning roses newly wash'd with dew; |