In the _Merchant of Venice,_ there is also the couple of Jessica and Lorenzo, those two lovers who do not feel the want of moral idealisation, nor, one would be inclined to say, any solicitude for the esteem of others. The man steals without scruple from the old Jew his daughter and his jewels, and the girl has not even a slight feeling of pity for the father, both alike plunged in the happy egotism of their pleasure. Jessica is unperturbed, sustaining and exchanging epigrams with her husband and the salacious jesting and somewhat insolent familiarity of the servant Lancellotto, though abandoning herself all the time to ecstasy, a sensual ecstasy, for she too is sensible to music and attains by means of it to a melancholy of the only sort that she is capable of experiencing, namely, the sensual. There is malice, almost mockery, though tempered with other elements, in the portrayal of these loves of the daughter of Shylock. But in those of Troilus and Cressida, we meet at once with sarcasm, a bitter sarcasm. The same background, the doings of the Trojan war, which in other comedies has the superficial charm of a decoration, is here also a decoration, but treated with sarcasm and bitterness. Thersites fills the part of the cynic among the Greek warriors, in the relations between Troilus and Cressida, as does Pandarus in Troy. The hastening of the last scenes should be noted, the large amount of fighting, the tumult: the world is dancing as in a puppet show, while the story of Troilus and Cressida is drawing to its close, amid the imprecations of the nauseated Troilus and the grotesquely burlesque lamentations of Pandarus. Another great artist of the Renaissance comes to mind, in relation to this play: not Ariosto, but Rabelais. The theme is still, however, the comedy of love, but a comedy bordering on the faunesque, the immoral, the baser instinct, upon lust and feminine faithlessness. Pandarus is ever the go-between; he laughs and enjoys himself, for he is an expert at this sort of business, a battle-stained warrior, as it were, bearing traces of that long amorous warfare, if not in his soul, in his old bones; he is the living destruction of love, of the credulous, sensual cupidity of man and of the non-credulous, frivolous vanity of woman. His too is the obsession of love-making: he is unable to extricate himself from it, taking an almost devilish delight in involving those who have recourse to him. Troilus does not displease Cressida, on the contrary, he pleases her greatly, yet she fences with him, because she is already in full possession of feminine wisdom and philosophy. She knows that women are admired, sighed after and desired as angels, while being courted, but once they have said yes, all is over. She knows that the true pleasure lies _in the doing,_ in the act and not in the fact, in the becoming, not in the become. She knows that in yielding, she is committing a folly, by breaking the law, which is