A woman mov'd is like a fountain troubled,
Muddy, ill-seeming, thick, bereft of beauty;
And, while it is so, none so dry or thirsty
Will deign to sip, or touch one drop of it.
Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,
Thy head, thy sovereign; one that cares for thee,
And for thy maintenance: commits his body
To painful labour, both by sea and land;

To watch the night in storms, the day in cold,
While thou liest warm at home, secure and safe;

And craves no other tribute at thy hands,
But love, fair looks, and true obedience ;--
Too little payment for so great a debt.
Such duty as the subject owes the prince,

Even such a woman oweth to her husband:

And, when she's froward, peevish, sullen, sour,
And not obedient to his honest will,

What is she, but a foul contending rebel,

And graceless traitor to her loving lord ?—

I am asham'd, that women are so simple

To offer war, where they should kneel for peace;
Or seek for rule, supremacy, and sway,
When they are bound to serve, love, and obey.
Why are our bodies soft, and weak, and smooth,
Unapt to toil and trouble in the world,

But that our soft conditions and our hearts
Should well agree with our external parts?
Come, come, you froward and unable worms!
My mind hath been as big as one of yours,
My heart as great; my reason, haply, more,
To bandy word for word, and frown for frown :

But now, I see our lances are but straws;

Our strength as weak, our weakness past compare,

That seeming to be most, which we least are.

Then vail your stomachs, for it is no boot,

And place your hands below your husband's foot:

In token of which duty, if he please,

My hand is ready, may it do him ease.

Pet. Why, there's a wench!-Come on, and kiss me, Kate.
Luc. Well, go thy ways, old lad, for thou shalt ha't.

Pet. Come, Kate, we 'll to bed :

We three are married, but you two are sped.

Hor. Now go thy ways, thou hast tam'd a curst shrew.
Luc. 'Tis a wonder, by your leave, she will be tam'd so.2

[Exeunt.

1 "His horse hipped," &c. &c.—If Ben Jonson had poured forth this profusion of horse-dealer's knowledge (a little overdone, it must be confessed, even for farce), it would have been charged against him as ostentation.

2 "'Tis a wonder, by your leave, she will be tam'd so."-He means to intimate that he does not think her tamed after all. A woman, by the way, like Katharine, could never have uttered those beautiful words about "a fountain troubled," &c. But this is the constant exception to Shakspeare's otherwise perfect nature. He makes all his characters, unless they are downright fools, talk as well as himself.

BEN JONSON.

(See "Imagination and Fancy," p. 195.)

THE greatest portion of Ben Jonson's comic writing is in prose; but the reader is here presented with a striking specimen in verse,—indeed, the best scene of his best production.

Ben Jonson's famous humour is as pampered, jovial, and dictatorial as he was in his own person. He always gives one the idea of a man sitting at the head of a table and a coterie. He carves up a subject as he would a dish; talks all the while to show off both the dish and himself; and woe betide difference of opinion, or his "favourite aversion," envy. He was not an envious man himself, provided you allowed him his claims. He praised his contemporaries all round, chiefly in return for praises. He had too much hearty blood in his veins to withhold eulogy where it was not denied him; but he was somewhat too willing to cancel it on offence. He complains that he had given heaps

of praises undeserved; tells Drayton that it had been doubted whether he was a friend to anybody (owing, doubtless, partly to this caprice) and in the collection of epigrams printed under his own care, there are three consecutive copies of verse, two of them addressed to Lord Salisbury in the highest style of panegyric, and the third to the writer's muse, consisting of a recantation, apparently of the same panegyric, and worth repeating here for its scorn and spleen :

TO MY MUSE.

Away, and leave me, thou thing most abhorr'd,
That hast betray'd me to a worthless lord;
Made me commit most fièrce idolatry

To a great image through thy luxury.

Be thy next master's more unlucky Muse,

And, as thou❜ast mine, his hours and youth abuse.
Get him the time's long grudge, the court's ill will,
And, reconcil'd, keep him suspected still.

Make him lose all his friends; and, which is worse,
Almost all ways to any better course.

(This is melancholy.)

With me thou leav'st an happier Muse than thee,
And which thou brought'st me, welcome Poverty.
She shall instruct my after thoughts to write
Things manly, and not smelling parasite.
But I repent me:-stay. Whoe'er is rais'd
For worth he has not, he is tax'd, not prais'd.

This is ingenious and true; but from a lord so

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worthless," it hardly became the poet to withdraw the alms of his panegyric. He should have left posterity to do him justice; or have reposed on the magnanimity of a silent disdain. Lord Salisbury was the famous Robert Cecil, son of Burleigh. Ben Jonson had probably found his panegyric treated with neglect, perhaps contempt; and it was bold in him to return it; but it was proclaiming his own gratuitous flattery.

It has been objected to Ben Jonson's humours, and with truth, that they are too exclusive of other qualities; that the characters are too much absorbed in the peculiarity, so as to become personifications of an abstraction. They have also, I think, an amount of turbulence which hurts their entire reality; gives them an air of conscious falsehood and pretension, as if they were rather acting the thing than being it. But this, as before intimated, arose from the character of the author, and his own wilful and flustered temperament. If they are not thoroughly what they might be, or such as Shakspeare would have made them, they are admirable Jonsonian presentations, and overflowing with wit, fancy, and scholarship.