The personal element in this first sportive production is, however, not difficult to recognise: it is the young poet's mirthful protest against a life immured within the hard-and-fast rules of an artificial asceticism, such as the King of Navarre wishes to impose upon his little court, with its perpetual study, its vigils, its fasts, and its exclusion of womankind. Against this life of unnatural constraint the comedy pleads with the voice of Nature, especially through the mouth of Biron, in whose speeches, as Dowden has rightly remarked, we can not infrequently catch the accent of Shakespeare himself. In Biron and his Rosaline we have the first hesitating sketch of the masterly Benedick and Beatrice of _Much Ado About Nothing_. The best of Biron's speeches, those which are in unrhymed verse, we evidently owe to the revision of 1598; but they are conceived in the spirit of the original play, and merely express Shakespeare's design in stronger and clearer terms than he was at first able to compass. Even at the end of the third act Biron is still combating as well as he can the power of love:-- "What! I love! I sue! I seek a wife! A woman, that is like a German clock, Still a repairing, ever out of frame, And never going aright, being a watch, But being watch'd that it may still go right!" But his great and splendid speech in the fourth act is like a hymn to that God of Battles who is named in the title of the play, and whose outpost skirmishes form its matter:-- "Other slow arts entirely keep the brain, And therefore, finding barren practisers, Scarce show a harvest of their heavy toil; But love, first learned in a lady's eyes, Lives not alone immured in the brain, But, with the motion of all elements, Courses as swift as thought in every power, And gives to every power a double power, Above their functions and their offices. It adds a precious seeing to the eye; A lover's eyes will gaze an eagle blind; A lover's ear will hear the lowest sound, When the suspicious head of theft is stopp'd: Love's feeling is more soft, and sensible, Than are the tender horns of cockled snails. . . . . . . . . Never durst poet touch a pen to write, Until his ink were temper'd with Love's sighs; O! then his lines would ravish savage ears, And plant in tyrants mild humility." We must take Biron-Shakespeare at his word, and believe that in these vivid and tender emotions he found, during his early years in London, the stimulus which taught him to open his lips in song. [1] Ludvig Holberg (1684-1754), the great comedy-writer of Denmark, and founder of the Danish stage.--(TRANS.) [2] _Raleigh_, by Edmund Gosse (English Worthies Series), p. 57. [3] _New Shakspere Society's Transactions_,1880-86, Pt. ii. p. 241. [4] The schoolmaster's wife in Ludvig Holberg's inimitable comedy, _Barselstuen._--(TRANS.) X