Gil d'Arblay walked slowly along the deserted streets of the village, through the afternoon's brightness and sunshine, with a feeling that he had never known before tugging at his heart. For, as I have said, he was no coward and—well, it is scarcely a good thing for a captain in the King's army to have it said that, being caught without his sword, he had failed to help a young royalist going to his death at the hands of a crowd of rioters in the public square of Montigny. And so, with face a little more flushed than usual, he hurried on, until he came to the house of an old servant, upon whom he knew he could rely. And presently the old house of his family was opened, very quietly, as the troubles of the time warranted, and Gil settled down to a life of quiet. Passing through the Terror, he came down to the glorious time of the Empire of to-day. But with all his old friends in the army, and our great Emperor winning victories on every battlefield in Europe, Gil d'Arblay has lost much of his military enthusiasm. He once had an old sword brought from Paris, which he hung up in his bedroom to be a memento, as he told his friends, of his past bravery; and then he would smile bitterly and hasten to change the subject, all of which seemed very strange to his old friends of Montigny.

But one day, as he was growing old, he summoned his intimates, made them take their stand about him, and then, before them all, reaching for the sword, inlaid in the old style with silver and the fleur-de-lys, he broke it with an ugly snap across his knee. Then without a word, save for some muttered reference to "the sword of a coward," he hurled it through the window, clattering, to the pavement below. And at this his friends were very much puzzled.— Some of them have even said that Gil has never worn a sword since one bright day in the spring of 1793, when the mob in Montigny killed a young man, a royalist and gentleman like himself. But how that concerned Gil d'Arblay his old friends of Montigny do not know.

Hulbert Taft.

THE THREE TRAVELERS.

Over the moors in the misty night

They ride from the sign of the White Hart inn,
And heavy's the gold and yellow-bright-

They covered it o'er with bottles of gin
And hid it in bags full deep, I ween,

On the way to Lynmouth town.

And lo! they see through the shuddering mist
A flying steed and horseman gray,

And one of them scowls and shakes his fist,-
""Tis only a pixie," the others say,

"That always comes at the dawn of the day

To frighten travellers to Lynmouth."

Knives of steel and hearts that bleed,
Shouts and groans on the sheeted air,
And great is the robber-leader's greed
And he looketh for gold-yea—everywhere,
But never a coin he findeth there
On the way to Lynmouth town.

"And now, since never a coin we find,

Why then by my stolen store," quoth he, "We'll hang them up in the empty wind."

And he strung them up to the gallows-tree

That stands by the side of the cross-roads three
On the way to Lynmouth town.

And now when the mists roll full and deep

Three shadowy steeds flee on through the gray
And the gibbet swings at the dawn's first peep,
But "Pixies, alack!" the yeomen say,
"That always come at the dawn of the day
To frighten travellers to Lynmouth."

P. H. Hayes.

DeForest Prize Oration.

THE ITALIAN PLAYS OF SHAKSPERE.

HERBERT WESCOTT FISHER.

SHAKSPERE has been the occasion of so much learned

writing, that it is a relief to get back to himself; just to turn through his own familiar pages, lingering over what is pleasant or striking, as in a ramble through the fields. It matters little what plays are selected. Shakspere is always Shakspere; and it is not for a moment to be supposed that the so-called Italian Plays have any but his usual theme: life. They do, indeed, treat rather of the more picturesque and romantic sides of life; but, except in one instance, it is English romance, not Italian; and even this distinction is to be found only in that fabric of adventure and poetic love which is woven about the characters-not in the inner nature of the characters themselves. Nevertheless, for the purposes of a literary ramble, the romantic mood is very appropriate; and the ease with which it may be turned to sentimental uses by a mind less robust than Shakspere's, only makes the genuine humanity of his characters more impressive.

Five plays, either wholly or partly associated with Italy, share this mood: The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet, Two Gentlemen of Verona.

This last is the one play which is a romance and little more. Its dramatic form is almost a blemish; for it is a story of incident, not like The Lady of the Lake: a dream of love and adventure, wherein we care not so much what the characters were as what befell them. Follow in this spirit through its smoothly flowing, often exquisite verses, and even Valentine's renunciation of his lady in favor of his penitent rival takes on the lustre of gallantry. The friendship and the love have just enough truth to stir us,

and just enough hyperbole to cast a glamour; resulting in something as near the sentimental as Shakspere ever approached.

Romeo and Juliet, however, with all the extravagance of Two Gentlemen of Verona, is thoroughly sincere. Its intensity is a part of the warmth and exuberance of the real Italy. Nowhere could such balcony scenes have taken place except amid the deep stillness of a southern garden, where the trailing luxury of many vines breathed fragrance, and many a dewy blossom looked up to a rich heaven of stars. In such a medium moved the ideal lovers of literature:-lovers too rapt for any awkwardness and too selfabandoned to be stilted. Utterly ingenuous, yet winsomely different are their first approaches. Yielding to an impulse hardly conscious, they find themselves together; confessing, recanting, apologising in a breath, and each in the other's heart before either knows what has happened. At once pure and passionate, theirs was a love for which one's heart melts as for the babes in the wood; and when Death, like an untimely frost, has rested on these fairest flowers of all the field, the story is laid aside with a tender sense of loss.

How different is the half-earnest wooing of Twelfth Night! that comedy of so many moods; which is playful, is biting, is uproarious, but all-permeated by the sighs of the languishing Orsino, who reclines among his sofacushions, content to love by proxy, so his passion be nourished with delicious music. It is he and those dainty feminine characters which lends a subtle grace to what were otherwise a mere game of romping. The humor is light, the poetry delicate, fanciful; and the whole refreshes one like a keen, blithe and innocent frolic, a sweet gale of laughter.

Buried in mirth also are the love themes of Much Ado About Nothing. But here the wholesomeness of the human heart is at its best; where laughter melts in tears and tears bubble again into laughter. The dialogue is brilliant

with wit; but it is arch and humorous, not simply clever and courtierlike; the buffets of sarcasm, however mercilessly dealt, healing with good nature the wounds they inflict. And the deepest and truest sympathies are touched by the pathos of Hero's story and by the anguish of Leanato, whose gray hairs would have come very near the grave without the harmonious ending which Shakspere contrived.

But the most typical of these plays,-indeed, if not Shakspere's greatest, surely his most perfect drama, is The Merchant of Venice. It combines what is best in the other four: the warmth of Romeo and Juliet, the breeziness of Twelfth Night, the wholesomeness of Much Ado About Nothing, the poetry of Two Gentlemen of Verona. The romantic mood still prevails. The very conditions upon

which Portia is to be won exalt her loveliness and make her doubly desirable, shedding on the whole story a kind of reflex of the old chivalrous spirit which slew dragons and cut Gordian knots and has always fascinated the imagination of humanity. Or, rather, this spirit makes a most delicate veil to soften the light; for the light is still pure. Indeed, the beauty of the drama is its harmony every way. There is a fair and proper blending of tragedy and joy with a just dominance of the latter. The ending is happy; and it is nothing amiss if, after it has all passed, we chance to recall the despairing, wicked and abused old Shylock as he tottered forth into the outer darkness so well deserved. For some such shadow is always athwart the path of life; some such warped career is forever stirring in the memory.

But, in Portia's avenue, this is a reminiscence we may very comfortably dispense with, wrapt as we are in sweeter things. What a scene, where moonlight, music and a pair of lovers make gracious the night! Many are the classic allusions suggested to the lovers, but that human caress of speech, that gentle roguishness of affection, dispels every vestige of pedantry. In such a night, indeed, did many an old-time lover meet his joy or fate; but the present is not so far out of mind but that