face and neck; the cheeks were still tinged with it when the executioner lifted the severed head, to show it to the people. "It is most true," says Forster, "that he struck the cheek insultingly; for I saw it with my eyes : the Police imprisoned him for it."

II

Thomas Carlyle

HEARTS must not sink at seeing Law lie dead;

No, Corday, no;

Else Justice had not crown'd in heaven thy head
Profaned below.

Three women France hath borne, each greater far
Than all her men.

And greater many were than any are
At sword or pen-

Corneille, the first among Gaul's rhymer race
Whose soul was free,

Descends from his high station, proud to trace
His line in thee..

Florence Nightingale

W. S. Landor

I

WHENE'ER a noble deed is wrought,

Whene'er is spoken a noble thought,

Our hearts in glad surprise

To higher levels rise..

The tidal wave of deeper souls

Into our inmost being rolls,

And lifts us unawares

Out of all meaner cares.

Honour to those whose words or deeds

Thus help us in our daily needs,

And by their overflow

Raise us from what is low!

Thus thought I, as by night I read
Of the great army of the dead,
The trenches cold and damp,
The starved and frozen camp—

The wounded from the battle plain,
In dreary hospitals of pain,
The cheerless corridors,

The cold and stony floors.

Lo! in that house of misery

A lady with a lamp I see

Pass through the glimmering gloom,

And flit from room to room.

And slow, as in a dream of bliss,

The speechless sufferer turns to kiss

Her shadow, as it falls

Upon the darkening walls.

As if a door in heaven should be

Opened, and then closed suddenly,

The vision came and went :
The light shone, and was spent.

On England's annals through the long Hereafter of her speech and song,

That light its rays shall cast

From portals of the past.

A Lady with a Lamp shall stand
In the great history of the land,
A noble type of good,
Heroic womanhood.

Nor even shall be wanting here
The palm, the lily, and the spear,

The symbols that of yore

Saint Filomena bore.

H. W. Longfellow

"SHE

II

HE was a grand lady to us soldiers, a regular mother, so kind, so gentle, and we often wondered if she ever went to sleep, because she was always at work among the sick, day and night."

Robert Holden (a Crimean veteran)

X

SHAKESPEARE'S WOMEN

From women's eyes this doctrine I derive:
They sparkle still the right Promethean fire;
They are the books, the arts, the academics,
That show, contain, and nourish all the world:
Else, none at all in aught proves excellent.

Shakespeare's Women

NOTE

Love's Labour's Lost

[OTE broadly in the outset Shakespeare has no heroes; he has only heroines. There is not one entirely heroic figure in all his plays, except the slight sketch of Henry the Fifth, exaggerated for the purposes of the stage; and the still slighter Valentine in The Two Gentlemen of Verona. In his laboured and perfect plays you have no hero. Othello would have been one, if his simplicity had not been so great as to leave him the prey of every base practice round him; but he is the only example even approximating to the heroic type. Coriolanus Cæsar-Antony, stand in flawed strength, and fall by their vanities;-Hamlet is indolent, and drowsily speculative; Romeo an impatient boy; the Merchant of Venice languidly submissive to adverse fortune; Kent, in King Lear, is entirely noble at heart, but too rough and unpolished to be of true use at the

critical time, and he sinks into the office of a servant only. Orlando, no less noble, is yet the despairing toy of chance, followed, comforted, saved, by Rosalind. Whereas there is hardly a play that has not a perfect woman in it, steadfast in grave hope and errorless purpose: Cordelia, Desdemona, Isabella, Hermione, Imogen, Queen Katherine, Perdita, Sylvia, Viola, Rosalind, Helena, and last, and perhaps loveliest, Virgilia, are all faultless; conceived in the highest heroic type of humanity.

Then observe, secondly,

The catastrophe of every play is caused always by the folly or fault of a man; the redemption, if there be any, is by the wisdom and virtue of a woman, and, failing that, there is none. The catastrophe of King Lear is owing to his own want of judgment, his impatient vanity, his misunderstanding of his children; the virtue of his one true daughter would have saved him from all the injuries of the others, unless he had cast her away from him; as it is, she all but saves him.

Of Othello I need not trace the tale ;-nor the one weakness of his so mighty love; nor the inferiority of his perceptive intellect to that even of the second woman character in the play, the Emilia who dies in wild testimony against his error:-"Oh, murderous coxcomb! What should such a fool Do with so good a wife?”

In Romeo and Juliet, the wise and entirely brave stratagem of the wife is brought to ruinous issue by the reckless impatience of her husband. In Winter's Tale, and in Cymbeline, the happiness and existence of two princely households, lost through long years, and imperilled to the death by the folly and obstinacy of the husbands, are redeemed at last by the queenly patience and wisdom of the wives. In Measure for Measure, the injustice of