Bottom as we opine, considered in his truthfulness, in his reflective powers of worldly semblance, awakens our pensiveness, not our mirth. We think of the thousands of his children, and the smile that would break at the mere words of the weaver, is chequered by the thought of his prosaic offspring. Yes; his offspring. It matters not that you point to—in his carriage, that you run through his accredited genealogy, that you show his armorial bearings. We answer—if he receive the goods of fortune as his _right_, with no thankfulness for the gifts, no gratitude displayed by constant sympathy with the wants and weaknesses of suffering man, though you call him marquis, we say he is the Babe of Bottom; and for his quarterings, though they date from the Conquest, the eye of our philosophy sees nought on his carriage panels but an ass’s head in a field, proper; and in the motto reads—“A bottle of hay!” [Illustration: A bottle of hay. ] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [Illustration] SHAKESPEARE IN CHINA “I cannot tell that the wisest Mandarin now living in China is not indebted for part of his energy and sagacity to Shakespeare and Milton, even though it should happen that he never heard of their names.” —Godwin’s _Essay on Sepulchres_. WE do great injustice to the College of Mandarins, if we think that body at the present time ignorant of the marvels of Shakespeare. No: Canton has produced its commentator, and, by means of his explanatory genius, it is hoped that in a few years the whole Celestial Empire will, in the fulness of its knowledge, bow to the majesty of the poet. At this moment we have before us a radiant evidence of the admission of the great teacher into the Sacred City: believe it, astounded reader, Shakespeare has gone farther than Nieuhoff. England, however—that England who has shown herself such an idolatress of her darling son—who has encircled the house in which he first drew breath with a golden rail—who has secured it from possible destruction at the hands of the bigot, by making it the property of the State—that England who, when the tree planted by the bard was felled by the axe, wept as she turned the timber into ’bacco-stoppers[4]—that England who, even at the present time, only a little more than two centuries after his death, has already begun to think of the propriety of erecting, at some future day, a national monument to her poet—that England cannot, after the many and affecting instances of her deep and maternal love towards her most illustrious child, refuse to aid in the dissemination of Shakespearanity in any corner of the world, but at the present interesting crisis, more particularly in the empire of China. Footnote 4: The Mulberry-tree was cut down; and the race of Gastrels is not extinct.