Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/282

 Phebe, the village coquette, a little above her condition, who reads and quotes tender love-lore, and learns to despise a swain; Mopsa and Dorcas, doting on ballads, watchful after pedlars to chaffer with across the hedge for tapes and ribbons; and Juliet's gossipy, free-spoken, easy-minded Mrs. Gamp. With this humble retinue, his imagination travelled down to the great city, and seemed to have introduced them soon, past all the barriers of etiquette, into Elizabeth's circle of ladies, where they went into the service of high-born qualities, and retailed to him the very heart-secrets of their mistresses. The dames of wealthy citizens sat in full costume for his "Merry Wives;" the noble partners of his friends and patrons yielded each to him a whisper of their chasteness, their high-spirit, their control, their tenderness.

"In the blazon of sweet beauty's best Of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow,"

he mastered Beauty of the form and soul, and gave to each her portion, from Imogen to Cleopatra,—

"The worser spirit, a woman color'd ill."

One could not, of course, claim for Shakspeare that his pages include all the varieties of women which Nature is capable of producing. He has no daughters of the people, like Egmont's Clara and Faust's Margaret: they are conceptions of a later date. But they are implied in the quality of his women; and we incline to think that Nature will not be able to invent a fresh style of woman, or to modify the standard types, unless she sets out with that essential peculiarity, the Womanliness,