and then surges back to his own pitiful state, transformed for a moment into an infuriated creature, all instinct, from which a hell-kite has stolen his mate and pretty brood. By what marvelous flash of poetic power Shakespeare in this mighty passage lifts that humblest image of parental care, a hen and chickens, into the heights of human passion. Ah! as one sees a hen with a brood of chickens under her,—how she gathers them under her wings, and will stay in the cold if she can but keep them warm,—one’s mind turns to those words of profound pathos spoken over the unloving Jerusalem; there was the voice of a nature into which was gathered all the father’s and the mother’s love. In these two passages one sees the irradiation of poor feathered life with the glory of the image of the highest. How important a part in the drama of King Richard III. do the young princes play; as princes, indeed, in the unfolding of the plot, yet as children in the poet’s portraiture of them. We hear their childish prattle, we see their timid shrinking from the dark Tower, and then we have the effect of innocent childhood upon the callous murderers, Dighton and Forrest, as related in that short, sharp, dramatic account which Tyrrel gives:— “Dighton and Forrest, whom I did suborn To do this ruthless piece of butchery, Although they were flesh’d villains, bloody dogs, Melting with tenderness and kind compassion Wept like two children in their deaths’ sad stories. ‘Lo, thus,’ quoth Dighton, ‘lay those tender babes:’ ‘Thus, thus,’ quoth Forrest, ‘girdling one another Within their innocent alabaster arms: Their lips were four red roses on a stalk, Which in their summer beauty kiss’d each other. A book of prayers on their pillow lay; Which once,’ quoth Forrest, ‘almost changed my mind; But O! the devil’—there the villain stopp’d; Whilst Dighton thus told on: ‘We smothered The most replenished sweet work of nature, That from the prime creation e’er she framed.’ Thus both are gone with conscience and remorse; They could not speak.” The glances at infancy, though infrequent, are touched with strong human feeling. Ægeon, narrating the strange adventures of his shipwreck, tells of the “Piteous plainings of the pretty babes That mourned for fashion, ignorant what to fear;” and scattered throughout the plays are passages and lines which touch lightly or significantly the realm of childhood: as,— “Pity like a naked, new-born babe;” “’Tis the eye of childhood That fears a painted devil,” in Macbeth; “Love is like a child That longs for every thing that he can come by;” “How wayward is this foolish love That like a testy babe will scratch the nurse, And presently all humble kiss the rod,” in Two Gentlemen of Verona; “Those that do teach young babes Do it with gentle means and easy tasks,” says Desdemona; and Cleopatra, when the poisonous asp is planting its fangs, says with saddest irony,—