In fact, genius was never penetrated with the varieties of woman's temperament till Shakspeare, picking up a few rustic specimens in Stratford, ran away with them to London, taking down there honest, red-fisted Audrey; Phebe, the village coquette, a little above her condition, who reads and quotes tender love-lore, and learns to despise a swain; Mopsa and Dorcas, doting on ballads, watchful after pedlars to chaffer with across the hedge for tapes and ribbons; and Juliet's gossipy, free-spoken, easy-minded Mrs. Gamp. With this humble retinue, his imagination travelled down to the great city, and seemed to have introduced them soon, past all the barriers of etiquette, into Elizabeth's circle of ladies, where they went into the service of high-born qualities, and retailed to him the very heart-secrets of their mistresses. The dames of wealthy citizens sat in full costume for his "Merry Wives;" the noble partners of his friends and patrons yielded each to him a whisper of their chasteness, their high-spirit, their control, their tenderness. "In the blazon of sweet beauty's best Of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow," he mastered Beauty of the form and soul, and gave to each her portion, from Imogen to Cleopatra,-- "The worser spirit, a woman color'd ill." One could not, of course, claim for Shakspeare that his pages include all the varieties of women which Nature is capable of producing. He has no daughters of the people, like Egmont's Clara and Faust's Margaret: they are conceptions of a later date. But they are implied in the quality of his women; and we incline to think that Nature will not be able to invent a fresh style of woman, or to modify the standard types, unless she sets out with that essential peculiarity, the Womanliness, which Shakspeare has described. As all the instruments of an orchestra are tuned upon a single pitch, and as all future modifications of the instruments must defer to the same if they mean to take rank in harmony, so all the women who are still possible to Nature must accord with her influential note. Shakspeare is content to strike that. Through all the chords which cluster around his different characters, we detect it: he seems to be making tuning-forks on the same pitch, but of various materials, to emphasize it to the ear. His plays take from it a consonant vibration that extends through scenes and lapses of time during which no woman's face appears. The tonic of her heart is diffused beyond the limits of her person; as when Ophelia's bloom clings to the fate of Hamlet, even while she waits in death for him to reach her funeral-rite. So the beautiful soul of Cordelia, that is little talked of by herself, and is but stingily set forth by circumstance, engrosses our feeling in scenes from whose threshold her filial piety is banished. We know what Lear is so pathetically remembering: the sisters tell us in their cruellest moments; it mingles