Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/284

 other climates to hold them in the clasp of her charm. The wider culture and the opportunities derived from modern wants have already increased the number of her gifts, and set her person in fresh shadings of character. Perhaps Macaulay's New Zealander, who is expected to meditate in the future over the ruins of London, will turn out to be a woman, of a variety which Shakspeare has nowhere precisely drawn. But, if all his plays should by that time have shared the fate of an extinguished England, there would she sit, the survivor in the direct line of descent from his essential Woman; by virtue of her sex the Sibyl foretelling the women who will be possible to Nature.

"Magnus ab integro sæclorum nascitur ordo: Jam redit et Virgo."

Woman, as she resembles man, was of less consequence to Shakspeare than woman in herself, apart from what she can do, can earn, or can aspire to. He merely received the feminine side of Nature into his recreating thought, the essential Woman, without respect to the exigencies of any period or style of culture,—the only She, such as woman must remain to the end of time underneath all her activities and requirements. Her sex is the unalterable decree which she can cast no ballot to vote away from her, and assume no profession to raze it from the eternal tablets of her distinction. All the purely modern questions which relate to her career; the efforts to equalize with man's her wages, to multiply her opportunities, to claim her interest in the politics of human rights, to secure her alleviating presence in the rude