the sweetest of poets in making nosegays, the nosegays in her hands become the richest of crowns. Courted by the prince in disguise at one of their rustic festivals, herself the mistress of the feast, she transforms the place into a paradise.

"What she does,

Still betters what is done. When she speaks,
He'd have her do it ever: when she sings,
He'd have her buy and sell so; so give alms;

Pray so; and for the ordering her affairs,

To sing them too: When she doth dance, he'd have her

A wave o' the sea, that she might ever do

Nothing but that; move still, still so, and own

No other function."

With the same delicacy and chastity of honor as her mother, she has less sternness and severity of carriage; the discipline of circumstances having left unchecked and unsubdued in her the freshness, the simplicity and playfulness of nature: yet, though her whole being is redolent of the scenes she has lived amidst,

"We cannot say, 'tis pity

She lacks instructions: for she seems a mistress

To most that teach."

With her mother's depth,' intensity and calmness of feeling, no perturbations can reach her; and when a cloud comes over the innocent brightness of her love:

"This dream of mine,

Being awake, I'll queen it no inch further,
But milk my ewes and weep."

Of course no man were more worthy of such a being, unless he were willing to give up all the rest of the world for her; and the prince shows himself abundantly worthy of her, in the sacrifice he makes, and the danger he confronts for her sake. As, prizing his love before the crown, he quiets her forebodings with the words,"Or I'll be thine, my fair,

Or not my father's: for I cannot be
Mine own, nor any thing to any, if

I be not thine: to this I am most constant,
Though destiny say, no;"

so prizing truth and honor above all things, he more than makes good his words by deeds:

"Not for Bohemia, nor the pomp that may

Be thereat gleaned; for all the sun sees, or

The close earth wombs, and the profound seas hide

In unknown fathoms, will he break his oath

To this his fair beloved."

Indeed, Florizell is ever the peer of Perdita: none but the best of men could have felt the perfections of such a woman; none but the best of women could have won the heart of such a mun; and if nothing can disturb the serenity of her love, nothing can subdue

LECTURES ON SHAKSPEARE.

the strength of his. Alive and glowing with the fire of noble passions, himself the very sum and abstract of true manliness, of honor, purity, intelligence and dignity, he seems at once the flower of princes, and the prince of gentlemen; and his love is truly "Promethean spark stolen from heaven, to give a godlike soul to man." It was only by being forced to renounce his princely inheritance and brave the threats of his father, that Florizell could show himself worthy of such a woman; and it was only by growing up a perfect queen amid purely pastoral influences, that Perdita could With so much skill does show herself worthy of such a man. Shakspeare arrange his plots for the proper development and mani

festation of his characters."

There is another peculiarity about the work of Mr. Hudson, which gives it a great value to the American reader, indeed to the modern reader on either side of the Atlantic. He is constantly making his subject practical; that is, applying the thoughts and sentiments that suggest themselves, to prevailing errors. Transcendentalism, false philanthropy, improved notions on the rights of women, false theories of reform, each gets a castigation as he passes, and he strikes no baby-blow. He is not one of those who believe that wisdom will die with us, but rather that much of true wisdom has disappeared with our forefathers, and that to get right, we have to go backward instead of forward. Amid the many instances with which the book is filled, the following taken from Othello is full of truth as well as bitter irony; he is speaking of Desdemona :

"We have been taught that the husband is to obey the wife as much as the wife the husband; and our next lesson probably will be, that the parent is to obey the child as much as the child the parent. O, divine science of equality! Chivalry, the first and fairest daughter of religion, has long since been gibbeted, and the puerility of the tournament has given place to the virility of the horse-race! Woman is to be raised above the awful prerogative of defencelessness; legislation having gone sick with a kind of atheistic philanthropy, is stepping in to rescue her from her old dependence on the religion of the other sex; and as she is losing her motives to this principle, so of course this principle is losing its motives to speak and act in her behalf. Saint Peter, by the way, was a very strange logician; not half so wise, probably as the sophists of our day: but then we should remember that Saint Peter had not the advantages of modern illumination! Writing to the churches, he enjoins on the men that they should give honor unto the wife as being the weaker vessel; thus assigning her supposed inferiority as the reason why she should have especial honor. Accordingly, our fathers were so stupid or benighted as to think, that even because woman is comparatively helpless and defenceless, therefore none but a brute, or a coward, or a ruffian, would dare to harm her. So that in their view the very defencelessness of woman was a wall of brass about her; but this was because they had not shaken off that absurd superstition sometimes called a soul. Hap

ily all such notions have now passed or are passing away; and it is even thought by some that marriage, like the State and the Church, is rather too old an institution to survive our present paroxysms of improvement. As a further development of this noble system, strange its advocates do not propose to get up a new edition of woman with beards and bass voices! Weighed in the balance of this sublime philosophy, Desdemona has of course been found wanting in the qualities that make up the idea of female heroism.

But seriously: In an age when freedom and dignity are sought for in insubordination; and obedience, save to ourselves, is not only thought, but, far worse, is even felt to be a sort of degradation: when wisdom, (queer wisdom!) inculcating an identity of rights and duties between the sexes, is giving us mannish women and effeminate men, forgetting that the more the sexes resemble, the less they will love and respect one another: when woman, instead of quietly doing her duties to secure her rights, that she may be in a condition to do her duties, and of course finds the former so long a labor that she can never come to the latter: when, reversing the doctrine and practice of our fathers, that married people "must be complicated in affections and interest, that there be no distinction between them of mine and thine;" and that "their gods should be as their children, not to be divided, but of one possession and provision," for that "whatsoever is otherwise is not marriage, but merchandize;"-when, reversing all this, marriage is passing from a junction of aims and interests into a conflict and competition thereof, and the old-fashioned way of regarding man and wife as one person, and so legislating round them, is getting reformed into a method of legislating between them; so that the wife, instead of seeking protection in her husband, in the religious awe with which, by a meek, gentle, submissive demeanor, she used in simpler times to inspire him, is resorting to legal provisions and securities for protection against him: when a heartless system of domestic equality and independence is crushing all the higher domestic sentiments, killing off old honor and loyalty and gentleness and generosity, by leaving them nothing to do, nor any occasion for their exercise ;-pumping out all the spontaneous chivalry of our nature, and leaving us no manhood for woman to trust, nor any womanhood for man to fear: when a sort of malignant, ferocious, philanthropy, sprung from the marriage of ambition and infidelity, is going about to strip off the sacred wardrobe which religion has gathered about our otherwise naked, shivering, defenceless nature, to supply its place with court-house logic and paper constitutions,-until the great sacrament and bond of society, the consecrated channel through which all social grace must come to us, or else not come at all, has got well nigh desiccated into a soulless, godless, impotent and impudent legality:-in such an age, it is surely far from strange, that the possession of lofty, heroic qualities should have been denied her

and who was guilty of no more heroism in respect of her husband than is implied in "though he slay me, yet will I trust in him;" or, in her own words,

"Unkindness may do much;

And his unkindness may defeat my life,
But never taint my love."

Well might Wordsworth say,

"The homely beauty of the good old cause
Is gone, our peace, our fearful innocence,

And pure religion breathing household laws."

Fortunately, however, notwithstanding our present surfeit of transcendental crotchets and theories, we may hope there yet survives a revisionary fund of healthy sentiment in human nature, which "the gentle lady married to the Moor" may fall back upon with confidence. People may wrangle and syllogise themselves into errors and follies as they will, but nature is still too strong for them, and, before this excellent pattern of wifely submission, will be pretty sure to vindicate herself in their hearts."

Some may object to Mr. Hudson's style as too abrupt and at times jagged, but every man to his peculiarities; he may polish these, but if he subdues them he will lose all that makes him readable. He sometimes gives strict grammar the go-by, bearing more interest in conveying his meaning clearly than grammatically. The defects, however, are few, and in our opinion these two volumes contain the best commentary on Shakspeare that ever has been written, and stamp Mr. Hudson as a clear, original thinker, and a strong minded man.

JUNE ON THE OCEAN.

BY L'A.

It is a delightful relief to the American traveler in Europe, to find himself once more on shipboard, fairly embarked for home. If he has been a conscientious traveler, the tranquility of a seavoyage is almost indispensable to his excited intellect and imagination, particularly if fresh from Italy, or the storied banks of the Rhine. Long before quitting the former, he becomes weary with the rapid and rich succession of antique novelties, and is almost horrified at the prospect of encountering another painting-gallery or museum. His recollections are inevitably more or less indistinct and confused. While opportunity offered, he gorged himself, and he needs time to digest the mental salmagundi. The innumera

ble army of gods and goddesses, heroes and heroines, in stone or on canvas, naked and draped, float in phantasmagoric dance before his over-wrought and bewildered memory. A month of repose in the solitude of the sea, is as sleep to a fevered man.

In summer, when the breezes blow fresh from the south and the waters and the sky rival each other's brightness; and above all, in the brilliant month of June, when the full moon is shining, the livelong night, and the sun rises and declines, day after day, week after week, in unclouded majesty, the ocean is a glory and a delight. Oh! forever, in sunshine and in storm, its glory is unchangeable as that of its mighty Maker! Images, all-beautiful and sublime, come thronging from its bosom, like its own eternal exhalations, and in the light of the soul they distil perpetually, a thousand graceful, rainbow-colored forms!

66

It is true, no song of birds greets your ear, with the rising day, or pleasant chirp of the grasshopper in the fresh grass, or other of those thousand sights and sounds, that so endear to the poet's heart, the leafy month of June." No waving groves or bright grain vary the broad scene. But then the green waves gleam and heave in the sunshine, and the light breeze flings over them all a net-work of silvery, bubbling foam, as of blossoms floating over a forest-top in the bloom of the rural year.

And you see no graves or ruins on the ocean. Men point proudly to the relics of their fathers' strife, where brother throttled brother, and left his foul carcass to infect the air; but the sea hides quickly its wrecks and its dead, and seems to stand over them with finger on its lip, to command our silence and awe.

And to the denizen of the town, the change is peculiarly grateful. June, in the town, is often hot and dusty. The air simmers up from the white side-walks, as over a hot stove. Now and then, a fitful gust sweeps round the corner of the street, bearing along a small column of dust. It suddenly subsides, leaving the dust to fall as in a cloud. The shops upon the sunny side of the way are deserted; and the younger partner comes often to the door, looking anxiously up street and down, for the shadow of a may-be customer. The school-girls coming home from school, fling carelessly upon their bonnets, their thick green veils, and nod familiarly, themselves unknown, to the young gentlemen who gather in the drug store to see them pass, and who are thereby sadly tantalized. Then perhaps a shower descends, as you are strolling lazily along in your blouse; and too hot, or too dignified to run, you finally reach refuge at your friend's, the jeweller's, looking forlorn as a patient in his hydropathic shirt.

Now, at sea, of course there's no dust. And saving the calms, which in these latitudes are rare and short, you may always revel in the luxury of a breeze. The glittering spray, scattered from some passing wave, often showers the deck, or drawing a rainbow crest over the summit of the wave itself, and then falling in a sheaf of liquid crystal, leaps up again in some new form, like old