"I would have thee live; For in my sense it is happiness to die." When Troilus finds Cressida has been false, he cries: "Let it not be believed for womanhood; Think! we had mothers." Ophelia, in her madness, "the sweet bells jangled out o' tune," says softly: "I would give you some violets; But they withered all when my father died." When Macbeth has reaped the harvest, the seeds of which were sown by his murderous hand, he exclaims,--and what could be more pitiful? "I 'gin to be aweary of the sun." Richard the Second feels how small a thing it is to be, or to have been, a king, or to receive honors before or after power is lost; and so, of those who stood uncovered before him, he asks this piteous question: "I live with bread, like you; feel want, Taste grief, need friends; subjected thus, How can you say to me I am a king?" Think of the salutation of Antony to the dead Cæsar: "Pardon me, thou piece of bleeding earth." When Pisanio informs Imogen that he had been ordered by Posthumus to murder her, she bares her neck and cries: "The lamb entreats the butcher: Where is thy knife? Thou art too slow To do thy master's bidding when I desire it." Antony, as the last drops are falling from his self-inflicted wound, utters with his dying breath to Cleopatra, this: "I here importune death awhile, until Of many thousand kisses the poor last I lay upon thy lips." To me, the last words of Hamlet are full of pathos: "I die, Horatio. The potent poison quite o'er crows my spirit * * * The rest is silence." XVI. SOME have insisted that Shakespeare must have been a physician, for the reason that he shows such knowledge of medicine--of the symptoms of disease and death--was so familiar with the brain, and with insanity in all its forms. I do not think he was a physician. He knew too much--his generalizations were too splendid. He had none of the prejudices of that profession in his time. We might as well say that he was a musician, a composer, because we find in "The Two Gentlemen of Verona" nearly every musical term known in Shakespeare's time. Others maintain that he was a lawyer, perfectly acquainted with the forms, with the expressions familiar to that profession--yet there is nothing to show that he was a lawyer, or that he knew more about law than any intelligent man should know. He was not a lawyer. His sense of justice was never dulled by reading English law. Some think that he was a botanist, because he named nearly all known plants. Others, that he was an astronomer, a naturalist, because he gave hints and suggestions of nearly all discoveries. Some have thought that he must have been a sailor, for the reason that the orders given in the opening of "The Tempest" were the best that could, under the circumstances, have been given to save the ship.