Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/218

 that throw a leer in passing. Even the high passionateness of kings and lovers, when it is the purest, seems to the average woman to blaze with extravagance. To her it is the overstatement that kidnaps true sentiment and brings it up for the stage. She does not recall a moment of her life that could have recognized such feeling, or have framed for her secretest thought a corresponding whisper. Do her brothers and acquaintances smoulder with these wraths and fervors inside of their demure suits of gray-mixed and black? Are all the men who circulate in society, and enframe her waist at balls, liable to attacks of this erysipelatous condition? Does she sit at divine service with such neat packages of rend-rock in the pew? So the Shakspearean ideal of the great passions of mankind has to be watered for her through the modern novel, trickle by trickle of protracted rhetoric, drop by drop of overflavored style. She turns with resentful cheeks from Juliet's expectant mood, and manages to read pages that are too sickly to kindle a blush. And yet perhaps they are equivocal enough to have puzzled Dame Quickly and frightened Falstaff. Certainly the equivoque has not lost its voice "with hollaing and singing of anthems."

Some offences, chiefly those which concern propriety and chasteness, are so repugnant to a woman's disposition that they excite a fanaticism which sometimes is slow, and sometimes eager, to condemn the reputed offender. That is to say, the same disposition is competent to give credence to an accusation slowly, or to give it impetuously and with loathing. If there be a case