“Nay, but make haste; the better foot before. O, let me have no subject enemies, When adverse foreigners affright my towns With dreadful pomp of stout invasion! Be Mercury, set feathers to thy heels And fly like thought from them to me again.” One of Shakespeare’s gems is the description which Sir Richard Vernon gives to Hotspur of the gallant appearance of “The nimble-footed madcap Prince of Wales” (_1 Henry IV._, act iv. sc. 1, l. 104, vol. iv. p. 318),— “I saw young Harry, with his beaver on, His cuisses on his thighs, gallantly arm’d, Rise from the ground like feather’d Mercury, And vaulted with such ease into his seat, As if an angel dropp’d down from the clouds, To turn and wind a fiery Pegasus And witch the world with noble horsemanship.” The railer Thersites (_Troilus and Cressida_, act ii. sc. 3, l. 9, vol. vi. p. 168) thus mentions our Hermes,— “O thou great thunder-darter of Olympus, forget that thou art Jove the king of gods; and Mercury, lose all the serpentine craft of thy caduceus.” And centering the good qualities of many into one, Hamlet (act iii. sc. 4, l. 55, vol. viii. p. 111) sums up to his mother the perfections of his murdered father,— “See what a grace was seated on this brow; Hyperion’s curls, the front of Jove himself, An eye like Mars, to threaten and command; A station like the herald Mercury New lighted on a heaven-kissing hill; A combination and a form indeed, Where every god did seem to set his seal To give the world assurance of a man.” Personifications, or, rather, deifications of the powers and properties of the natural world, and of the influences which presided over them, belong especially to the ancient Mythology. Of these, there is one from the Emblem writers decidedly claiming our notice, I may say, our admiration, because of its essential truth and beauty;—it is the Personification of Fortune, or, as some writers name the goddess, Occasion and Opportunity; and it is highly poetical in all its attributes. From at least four distinct sources in the Emblem-books of the sixteenth century, Shakespeare might have derived the characteristics of the goddess; from Alciat, Perriere, Corrozet, and Whitney. Perriere’s “THEATRE DES BONS ENGINS,” Paris, 1539, presents the figure with the stanzas of old French here subjoined,—