its sweet uses, namely, to beat out all the grain, and leave nothing in you but the chaff. So with Madam Flirt. But to return to our other simile. Are you a medical man? or have you talked with one? then you know that what we said of the flail, is true of the epidemic. You cannot tell where it will fall. Three may stand together in line. The first shall be taken, the second left, and the third die. You may enter a hospital where but one person is affected, and though you keep a most respectful distance, you may find, "poor Turlygood! poor Tom! the foul fiend hath bewitched thee !"

So, again we say, is it with Madam Flirt. She chooseth her victims; let others call it haphazard; we, who are unlearned in these things, can only record the bare facts, and our astonishment, and believe there is in it some mystery hitherto passing knowledge, which only galvanism, or mesmerism, or some other ism yet in the womb of time, may in future ages reveal. We only know of an attempt once made on ourselves. The victimization we just escaped, we shudder even now to contemplate. Why the attempt was made we never could discover. Miss Miggs would have said we were no great catch; perhaps, for the lady was older,—ahem, not so young as we; it might have aided her memory in recalling

"The days when she went gipsying,
A long while ago!"

Why do we write all this? Because Portia "stands within the danger" of every word of it. How she treats her

suitors! Love is a

Naples, the Pala

burning process, and she bakes them by the batch. tine, France, England, Scotland, and Germany, (their princes we mean) are done first and quickly. Morocco, Arragon, and the Venetian fellow, The Prince of Morocco is the only fine character of the number, and Portia paid her homage to his virtue

detain us longer.

"In terms of choice I am not solely led
By nice direction of a maiden's eyes;
Besides, the lottery of my destiny
Bars me the right of voluntary choosing.
But if my father had not scanted me,

And hedged me by his wit to yield myself

His wife, that wins me by that means I told you,

Yourself, renowned prince, then stood as fair
As any comer I have looked on yet,

For my affection."

Shade of Talleyrand! Words were given us to conceal our thoughts!

Morocco understands her not.

"Even for that I thank you," says the

noble fellow, nescius auræ fallacis. And how stood her affection for former comers! "How like you," asks Nerissa, "the young German, the Duke of Saxony's nephew?" Portia-" Very vilely in the morning, when he is sober, and most vilely in the afternoon, when he is drunk ; when he is best, he is a little worse than a man, when he is worst, he is little better than a beast: an the worst fall that ever fell, I hope I shall make shift to go without him." She says afterwards-" I am glad this parcel of wooers are so reasonable, for there is not one among them but I dote on his very absence." We make no comment, other than to repeat the common justification, "all ladies do so." We could say much more about the Prince of Morocco; we could argue the justice of his choice of the golden casket, and insist that his was the truest love who rated himself very high, yet "not so high as to deserve the lady," proving himself thereby now higher far. He fails; so does the illtempered fool of Arragon. Portia is anxious for Bassanio's delay, being ready to die for fear of losing him. He, however, has no such fears; he has had a long run of ill-luck, and he knows well the doctrine of chances. His mind presaged him questionless thrift, and he would bet anything upon his success. In the true spirit of his profession, he chooses the lead; he takes the most desperate speculation and wins. Portia, hereupon, makes her first set speech, which is referred to everywhere in proof positive of her excellence. Yet in this very speech such an "excellent wit" hath this merry lass, half-sister, we presume, though we are not positively told so, to Launcelot Gobbo, that she has already planned her joke about the ring, with all her professions. In the next scene but one, she so hears and answers the compliments of Lorenzo, as to make us seriously fear that she would tell a fib, so it were a downright one, with more of the " oculo irretorto," than she could the plain truth. She gets rid of him, and begins her plan directly and then begins that daring breach of the proprieties, which she executed so cleverly, that Queen Godiva herself has been made to shrink from the comparison. We are told that Portia so loved her husband, that no obstacle, not even personal exposure, could prevent her following him. Yet we humbly submit that to do this, she need not have told Lorenzo she was going to a monastery; she need not have despatched orders to Bellario to feign sickness, and to send her instead with the requisite "notes and garments;" she need not have preached about mercy, and quibbled about law, and ended with cruelty. It would have been not less romantic, and more loving, to have gone quietly with her husband. But that would never have done for Portia. The truth stares out at us, that her object was neither more nor less than what a schoolboy would call a "jolly good lark."

The last act of the play is full of beautiful poetry until Portia enters. We can acknowledge no less epithet then than disgusting. Her coming in has "dropped like an acid" upon it. And yet there is no fault found by the critics, or it is referred to the manners of the age, and said to hold equally of all Shakspere's female characters. All! where in Desdemona? where in Cordelia? where in Isabella? where in Ophelia? where in Juliet ?—ay, where in Juliet? Alone, in her own silent chamber, she pours forth that beautiful hymn to Night of truest modesty; so far above Portia, that we wonder not at the sickly prudery of her admirers, who have the indecency to think that indecent. When Portia replies to Nerissa's question—

we are at no loss to find the lewd interpreter. A lady passing through a gallery, remarked that a picture was improper; the remark was thought more so. Portia is just such another. In short, for physical beauty, worldly wealth, intellectual acuteness, and polite manners, Portia, the lady, commands our admiration. With all these qualities, and for her truth, her constancy, and reverent devotion, Juliet, the woman, wins our love.

J.

2.

RUDEL.

NOTE. The principal circumstance described in this poetical attempt, actually occurred in 1162. The personage named Aladine was, in fact, a Countess of Tripoli; and Rudel, after dying in the manner here related, was buried by her at Tripoli beneath a tomb of porphyry. Both Rudel, and Bertrand d'Allamanon who accompanied him, were Troubadours; and some verses, written by the former to his distant love, are still extant. See Sismondi's History of the Literature of the South of Europe, translated by Thomas Roscoe, Vol. I. pp. 104—6.

'Tis a lonely bark on the slumberous seas,
That sails in the hush of a summer night,
With a track of tremulous glow it flees,

Like a spirit that glides to her home of light;
And the moon hath sighed to the sighing breeze,
And their whisperings wander the midnight through,
Over the waves that murmur and pray,

They would chase the encurtaining clouds away,
That have charmed to sleep in their lattice blue

The stars that should hark to their minstrelsy.
So the waves they flash, and the winds they sigh,
And the ship glides over the silver sea,

While the love-looks pale of the moonlight lie
On gorgeous sail and banner, high

With the proudest of Norman blazonry.

Stretched on the deck a warrior lies,

With powerless hand and lightless eyes;

'Tis Rudel,-woe befall the hour

When love thus withered knighthood's flower!
The flame of passion grew, and grew,

Like the fire in the heart of a cloud of thunder,

Lingering, luridly lurking under,

Soon to shatter it through and through-

Thus had love its birth with him;
Until that slumberless spirit, Thought,
And faithless Hope, his Reason sent
An outcast from her tenement,
Leaving the mansion scathed and rent.
His soul with a phrensy-vein was wrought,

Yet with it a calm was enwoven and blent,
So, tranced it lay, like a shadow brought

By the spell of a mist which the moon hath kissed, That is flung with a fashioning warped and grim To lie and sleep by a haunted keep,

At the foot of a ruinous battlement.

Passing and weak as a dying breath,
About his tremulous mouth and eyes
Ghosts of smiles at times would rise,
That by the icy lips of sighs
Had long ago been kissed to death ;—
Wondering at one another,

Each so changed and wan and wild,
As, like the spirit of a mother

Hovering near her friendless child,
Each restless phantom wandered o'er
The face it kissed so oft before.
Faint and failing, feeble, few,
Whispers went up now and then

From his dreamy rest, but ere they grew
To words-sank down to a hush again,
From wonder to think they were ever born
Out of lips so bloodless and sorrow worn.

Like a lily that breathes in a sunless dell,
Where the hemlock hangs on the gloomy stream,
And daily and nightly is warded well
By the wings of a faëry sentinel,—

(For there his queen is to sleep and dream,

And her bed must be kept from the withering spell

Of nightshade and sorrowful asphodel ;)—

So beamed the beauty of Aladine,

Girt round with its own magic line,
And by a breath of calm enwreathed
A guardian spirit had out-breathed,
As gentle as holy airs that dwell
With a hallowed flame in a lonely cell.
A sceptre of queenly might she bare
In Moslem realms, (alas! that ever
A star within such cloud should vainly quiver!)
On Egypt's shore where the sultry air
Sleeps to the lull of the tideless sea,
Whereon the widely-winding River
Leans his last waves wearily,-
Waves that many palm-crowned isles
Watched with whispers and sunny smiles,
Until their chainless flow was hid

By palace or by pyramid,

That now are cast unheeded, broken,

(As words forgotten love hath spoken)
A wilderness of surge amid.
But rays of Christian light began

On Aladine to fall, e'en there,
And nightly she in a lonesome cell,

At the foot of a winding dungeon stair,

Harked to the words of a holy man

Who in that hidden depth did dwell,

And taught her to bow at the cross in prayer.