“_Jaques._ All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players: They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages. At first the infant, Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms. Then the whining school-boy, with his satchel And shining morning face, creeping like snail Unwillingly to school. And then the lover, Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier, Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard, Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel, Seeking the bubble reputation Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice, In fair round belly with good capon lined, With eyes severe and beard of formal cut, Full of wise saws and modern instances; And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon, With spectacles on nose and pouch on side, His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice, Turning again toward childish treble, pipes And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all, That ends this strange eventful history, Is second childishness and mere oblivion, Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans every thing.” In far briefer phrase, but with a similar comparison, in reply to the charge of having “too much respect upon the world,” Antonia (_Merchant of Venice_, act i. sc. 1, l. 77, vol. ii. p. 281) remarked,— “I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano; A stage, where every man must play a part, And mine a sad one.” The pencil and the skill alone are wanting to multiply the Emblems for the Poetic Ideas which abound in Shakespeare’s dramas. His thoughts and their combinations are in general so clothed with life and with other elements of beauty, that materials for pictures exist in all parts of his writings. Our office, however, is not to exercise the inventive faculty, nor, even when the invention has been perfected for us by the poet’s fancy, to give it a visible form and to portray its outward graces. We have simply to gather up the scattered records of the past, and to show what correspondencies there really are between Shakespeare and the elder Emblem artists, and, when we can, to point out where to him they have been models, imitated and thus approved. Though, therefore, we might draw many a sketch, and finish many a picture from ideas to be supplied from this unexhausted fountain, we are mindful of the humbler task belonging to him who collects, and on his shelf of literary antiquities places, only what has the stamp of nearly three centuries upon them. [Illustration: _Boissard, 1596._]