Another kind of misrepresentation has issued from another quarter whence it should have been least expected. Some of the noblest women of modern times have filed a complaint against Shakspeare's women, and brought them into the court of the latest ideas, charged with the crime of being characterless, mere puppets of the will of the dominant sex; not the tutors, indeed, but the feeders of his riot, complaisant creatures who accept the purpose of the universe to keep men supplied with love, and whose most prominent traits are those which protect and confirm the union of the sexes. It is alleged that Shakspeare "never foretold a better woman than he saw," because "he lacked an ideal of humanity and life:" he withheld from her the personal consequence which belongs to strong individualities who detach themselves from their age to view, scrutinize, and remodel it. It is astonishing to read what Mrs. Farnham,[16] whose life was most unselfish and heroic, has said about Shakspeare's ideas of women, that "he authorized in his sentiments all manner of passional, sensual, and drunken usurpation of man over woman, every kind of force to degrade her which the law did not punish; and only felt bound to satirize and speak coarsely of _her_ after it had been exercised; men, who repeated such experiences never so often or basely, being no less heroes for his dramas, fit to lead in council, rule in honorable war, and receive the homage of society. The leading characteristics of woman, as he portrayed her, are sensuality, and fickleness, its uniform attendant in either sex; capriciousness, vanity, desire to be loved, more for the power than the pure happiness of it; a disposition to exercise that fleeting, petty power tyrannically,--so far, to play the man on the child's scale; weakness, helplessness indeed, against temptation, and a paramount selfishness which is only modified, or very rarely turned into generosity, towards the man whose love permits her to love in return; for which, and chiefly, in its narrowest, most material sense, she seems in his estimation to have been created." It is not possible to misread the plays of Shakspeare more profoundly than this. They have been viewed in the color of some exclusive ideas concerning the nature and the mission of woman, in whose advocacy the writer spent a noble life. Not finding in any of the plays precise statements that reflect the most advanced sentiments upon the Woman Question, and discovering that Shakspeare was neither morally nor politically a partisan, and that neither position nor reflection impelled him to anticipate modern ideas on social subjects, the writer declares that he was not the poet of woman because he was not her prophet. A criticism more destructive than this of the Shakspearean delineations cannot be made. In fact, no _doctrinaire_ of ethics, politics, theology, can suitably approach Shakspeare with a critical purpose.