the baby dawn of their senses and their soul from the sunrise of Shakespeare's Cleopatra. Never has he given such proof of his incomparable instinct for abstinence from the wrong thing as well as achievement of the right. He has utterly rejected and disdained all occasion of setting her off by means of any lesser foil than all the glory of the world with all its empires. And we need not Antony's example to show us that these are less than straws in the balance. Entre elle et l'univers qui s'offraient a la fois Il hesita, lachant le monde dans son choix. Even as that Roman grasp relaxed and let fall the world, so has Shakespeare's self let go for awhile his greater world of imagination, with all its all but infinite variety of life and thought and action, for love of that more infinite variety which custom could not stale. Himself a second and a yet more fortunate Antony, he has once more laid a world, and a world more wonderful than ever, at her feet. He has put aside for her sake all other forms and figures of womanhood; he, father or creator of Rosalind, of Cordelia, of Desdemona, and of Imogen, he too, like the sun-god and sender of all song, has anchored his eyes on her whom "Phoebus' amorous pinches" could not leave "black," nor "wrinkled deep in time"; on that incarnate and imperishable "spirit of sense," to whom at the very last The stroke of death is as a lover's pinch, That hurts, and is desired. To him, as to the dying husband of Octavia, this creature of his own hand might have boasted herself that the loveliest and purest among all her sisters of his begetting, with her modest eyes And still conclusion, shall acquire no honour, Demurring upon me. To sum up, Shakespeare has elsewhere given us in ideal incarnation the perfect mother, the perfect wife, the perfect daughter, the perfect mistress, or the perfect maiden: here only once for all he has given us the perfect and the everlasting woman.