career which would have unsexed one of Shakspeare's plays. I have no fear. Stand aside: cease that frantic bracing of the masculine back against so many doors of prescription. Throw them wide open, and let Shakspeare's stately crowd pass up and down to scan the vista through them. Come, patient, chaste, obedient, high-spirited Imogen, too docile Ophelia, frank Perdita, warm Julia, bright and witty Beatrice, whose tongue is a pen already, or the etcher's tool; come, thou accomplished, grave, acute, and self-possessed Portia; thou unsophisticated Miranda, who would fain share thy lover's toil; thou shifty, prompt Maria, hater of humbug; thou tender Viola,--come, choose how many of these men's garments you will continue to wear, preferring to be women. Not one of them, I venture to declare, which your eternal instinct will feel to cramp or to disguise the form. "Dost thou think," says Rosalind, "though I am caparison'd like a man, I have a doublet and hose in my disposition?" Perdita, I think, if she were not discovered to be a king's daughter, might take to floriculture, and earn a living by it. She would no longer keep her dainty pique against the gilly-flower, but learn to marry "A gentler scion to the wildest stock," and thus mend Nature. She would prefer to be "Flora peering in April's front," along meadows which Proserpine might have roved through, far from the university and the din of scholarships. And pray restrain Ophelia from the commission of suicide by joining a nunnery; but do not save her life to put her to a trade that turns upon any other knack than simple beauty. A woman who can enthrall a Hamlet will esteem it no derogation to pluck from his memory a rooted sorrow. It is a profession quite as sanative as Helena's, whose father had taught her the use of curious drugs, and bequeathed to her "prescriptions of rare and prov'd effects." But let Ophelia be simply beautiful, be surprising like the first May-flowers, be winning like unobtrusive violets; let her exhale, like slopes that are brown with needles of the pine. Preserve the maid who held Hamlet's princely heart in the hollow of a moist and rosy hand: let her survive among us to hold others, to unwrinkle brows of speculation with a finger-tip, to unknot the snarls of business and ferocious care with kisses which the street will not overhear. Out of all her craze may she gather up again and redistribute the flowers of her shy disposition, "for remembrance; pray you, love, remember;" and some for herself too, "we may call it herb of grace o' Sundays." Do not tempt Ophelia to drown herself again "With annoyance of charity schools or of districts." Turn over all such business to that pragmatic and correct Isabella: she will do better in it than in making a whole nunnery miserable with posted notices of the dangers to virtue and of rules for being severely let alone. But Ophelia,