public opinion brought against James for his conduct in neglecting to defend the Palatinate. We all know how he clung to peace, when many people thought that peace was neither safe nor honourable, and how, when he finally made up his mind to offer assistance, he refused to declare war openly, and took credit to himself for allowing volunteers to go to fight for his son-in-law under Sir Horace Vere. Let us now see how far all this is mirrored in the character of Roberto, King of Sicily.

The first scene of the first act introduces an ambassador from Ferdinand, Duke of Urbino, to Roberto as soon as he has taken his seat upon his throne. A few touches are enough to carry the audience from Ferdinand, Duke of Urbino, to Frederick, Elector Palatine, whose acceptance of the Bohemian crown caused all the trouble.

"Amb.

Your Majesty

Hath been long since familiar, I doubt not,
With the desperate fortunes of my lord; and pity

Of the much that your confederate hath suffered,

You being his last refuge, may persuade you

Not alone to compassionate, but to lend

Your royal aids to stay him to his fall

To certain ruin. He, too late, is conscious

That his ambition to encroach upon

His neighbour's territories, with the danger of

His liberty, nay, his life, hath brought in question
His own inheritance."

Frederick's relations to the Palatinate and to Bohemia could not be more neatly put. The ambassador goes on to describe his master's plight in the city which he had thus seized, and asks for assistance for him just as Frederick asked aid in his difficulties in Bohemia. Roberto's answer is conceived in the very spirit of James.

"Rob.

Since injustice

In your duke meets this correction, can you press us

With any seeming argument of reason,

In foolish pity to decline his dangers,

To draw them on ourself? Shall we not be

Warn'd by his harms? The league proclaim'd between us

Bound neither of us further than to aid

Each other, if by foreign force invaded."

The exact description of the interpretation put by James upon the treaty which bound him to the Princes of the Union.

"And so far in my honour I was tied.

But since, without our counsel or allowance,
He hath ta'en arms, with his good leave he must
Excuse us if we steer not on a rock

We see and may avoid. Let other monarchs
Contend to be made glorious by proud war,
And with the biood of their poor subjects purchase
Increase of empire, and augment their cares

In keeping that which was by wrongs extorted,
Gilding unjust invasions with the trim

Of glorious conquests; we, that would be known

The father of our people, in our study

And vigilance for their safety, must not change

Their ploughshares into swords, and force them from

The secure shade of their own vines, to be

Scorch'd with the flames of war: or, for our sport
Expose their lives to ruin."

Then follows a conversation between the King and Bertolo, who urges the advantages of war, and reminds Roberto that he rules over an island. He calls it Sicily, but he is evidently thinking of England.

"Here are no mines of gold

Or silver to enrich you: no worm spins
Silk in her womb, to make distinction
Between you and a peasant in your habits:

No fish lives near our shores whose blood can dye
Scarlet or purple; all that we possess

With beasts we have in common: nature did
Design us to be warriors, and to break through
Our ring, the sea, by which we are environ'd,
And we by force must fetch in what is wanting,
Or precious to us."

After much more in the same strain, the King replies:

Our counsel's built upon so weak a base
As to be overturn'd, or shaken, with
Tempestuous winds of word. As I, my lord,
Before resolved you, I will not engage

My person in this quarrel; neither press
My subjects to maintain it; yet, to show

My rule is gentle, and that I have feeling

O' your master's sufferings, and these gallants, weary

Of the happiness of peace, desire to taste

The bitter sweets of war, we do consent

That, as adventurers and volunteers,

No way compell'd by us, they may make trial

Of their boasted valours."

The question naturally rises to our lips, What object could any one have in holding the mirror up to nature, in a form likely to be so particularly offensive to the King? The answer is not very difficult to discover. As the play in which this scene occurred followed close upon "The Emperor of the East," it must have been produced at some time between the spring of 1631 and the following year, when it was printed. In the summer and autumn of 1631 Charles was doing exactly what his father had done in 1620. Gustavus Adolphus had long been looking to him for assistance. Charles gave permission to the Marquis of Hamilton to carry over volunteers to his help, just as James had allowed Vere to carry over volunteers to the Palatinate. Hamilton sailed in July, 1631. Then came diplomacy. Vane was sent to negotiate with Gustavus, whilst Anstruther was negotiating in Vienna. Charles felt sure that he had done enough to induce one ruler or the other to engage to restore the Palatinate to his brother-in-law. But he would not engage in open war, for which indeed, as matters stood, he was destitute of the means. He refused even to send more volunteers to reinforce Hamilton's diminished levies. His Majesty, wrote Secretary Dorchester, in December, felt Hamilton's losses "like a father of his

people to whom their blood is precious," and he would, therefore, risk no more soldiers in Germany. Roberto's last speech no longer represents the words of James. It brings before us Charles himself, as he must have appeared to those who wished him to take an active part in the war.

The party to which Massinger attached himself was not one to which any Englishman can look back with satisfaction. The Queen's faction thought more of its quarrel with the Westons, of its private jealousies in Court and Council, than of the responsibilities of power. Ever clamouring for war and a Parliament, they had no policy to prepare for war and no statesmanship to direct a Parliament.

A man like Massinger, however, may very well have thought, as the able and excellent Sir Thomas Roe thought, that at least they were better than their rivals. The mere materialism of Weston's policy must have been offensive to him. To seek to keep the peace and encourage commerce, in the hope that the people being well fed would cease to care for Parliamentary debates, was a very unideal aim for a statesman to set before himself. It touched the lowest part of English nature, its love of practical success as measured by wealth. It had its exponents too in literature, in that poetry of which the inspiring thought is

"that woman is but dust,

A worthless toy for tyrants' lust,"

and which, whenever it raised its thoughts above the fleeting follies of the moment, eulogized peace, not as the parent of fruitful works and innocent joys, but as opening possibilities of self-indulgence. Carew's verses on the death of Gustavus Adolphus, to which I have before referred, may be taken as a measure of the baseness which festered round the Court of Charles I.

"The Maid of Honour" may be taken as a protest against this mode of regarding the world. I do not know whether there is any truth in the supposition that Massinger was a Roman Catholic. But it is evident that he had much in him which leant that way. The scene in which Camiola is claimed as a nun helps us to understand the Court conversions which frightened Protestant England into rage, and which had as much to do as ship-money had with the final uprising against Charles.

Camiola takes refuge in a nunnery, not from any desire to obtain freer scope for spiritual aspirations, but in order that she may be safe. She wants to reach

"the secure haven, where Eternal happiness keeps her residence, Temptations to frailty never entering."

She is, says Roberto,

"a fair example

For noble maids to imitate! Since to live

In wealth and pleasure 's common, but to part with
Such poison'd baits is rare: there being nothing
Upon this stage of life to be commended."

The

Nothing to be commended! What a voice to rise from the Court of Charles! We have lately had in the pages of the Quarterly Review an arraignment of the Houses of Commons which successively stood up against the King. The faults and vices of Parliaments are patent to the world. Their unjust judgments, their hasty condemnations, are published in the face of all men. Court of Charles robed itself in outward decency and escaped the penetrating eye. Here and there we are able to lift the veil, and we are soon repelled by the vacuity, the want of moral earnestness of the life behind. No wonder Court gentlemen and Court ladies fled from its vacuity to a form of religion which offered to save them from this living death.

Upon a play with such an ending it is difficult to rest with satisfaction. Instinctively we turn from her who ends as Camiola ends to her who begins where Camiola ends-to the bright, clear soul of the Isabella of "Measure for Measure," which, starting from the restrictions of convent life, and carrying with her the ignorance of the world, the slowness to understand the meaning of evil, the readiness to be guided by others, which naturally flow from such a mode of life, triumphs over them all by the innate purity and bravery of her spirit, and finds at last in the very heart of the city of abominations a place where she can work more worthily than in self-chosen retirement.

If we turn from Massinger back to Shakespeare, we may turn forward too to the singer of the "Comus." Two years were to pass away after the exit of Camiola before Milton took upon himself to unfold

"The sublime notion and high mystery
That must be uttered to unfold the sage
And serious doctrine of virginity;"

of that clearness of spirit and purity of soul which as Shakespeare and Milton knew, and as Charles's dramatists did not know, is the saving grace of man and of woman, of the matron and the maid.

S. R. GARDINER.

THE REALITY OF DUTY:

AS ILLUSTRATED BY THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MR. JOHN STUART MILL.

MR.

R. MILL'S Autobiography was written in order to let posterity know how his education was conducted and his intellect formed. To those who share his opinions it is interesting as showing what he desires to show. To others it is hardly less so, as exhibiting (on their view) a struggle of human nature against the adverse bias of a powerful theory and an elaborate training. It is in this point of view that I desire to examine it, so far as it relates to the history of Mr. Mill's moral sentiments, and some of the philosophical tenets which grew out of them.

His account of his childhood is like nothing else in the world. Remembering the nature of the man, our first wonder is to find him so much of a manufactured article. In general, influences which go to make up character are complex and heterogeneous. The varied discipline, the pleasures, the pains, the quarrels and attachments of family and school, chance companionships, chance adventures, chance books, sicknesses, mishaps, escapades and their consequences, combine beyond possibility of analysis to make the boy what he becomes. But the boy John Stuart Mill was the creation of a single force, applied by a single mind to a responsive material. His history, according to his own representation, is the history of paternal discipline applied relentlessly, unceasingly, exclusively of other influences, from the cradle, and with a definite and inflexible purpose. It is evident that, clearly to understand Mr. John Mill, you must first understand his