comedy of Launce and Speed. In the Merchant of Venice all these are reproduced and developed. The change in the catalogue of lovers is a distinct improvement. In the first instance the mistress proposed the names and the maid commented on them, which was amusing but rude; here the maid proposes the names and the mistress comments, which is both amusing and at least according to Elizabethan notions consistent with good manners.1 Launce and Speed are reproduced in Launcelot Gibbo and his father, a much better contrasted or at least more varied pair. The disguised heroine, on the other hand, is not only repeated but trebled. There are but three women in the Merchant of Venice; and all three assume male costume as complete a concession to the taste of audiences as you shall find in all dramatic literature.

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What really makes the Merchant of Venice so permanently effective, however, is not so much these welltried devices, which after all prove chiefly that the play is constructed with careful theatrical intelligence. It is rather that along with this care appears the trait which we have clearly seen growing in Romeo and Juliet, in Richard III., and in King John. From beginning to end, the characters of the Merchant of Venice are so individual and so human that one's attention centres wholly on them. As readers or as spectators we become convinced that these people are real; in consequence we accept everything else as a matter of course. Appreciating who and what the

1 Cf. Two Gentlemen of Verona, I. ii. with Merchant of Venice, I. ii.

characters are, we never stop to remark what absurd things they do.

Of course, this profoundly human conception is pre sented by conventional means as remote as possible from modern realism. More than two-thirds of the play is in verse, and much of the prose might as fairly be termed poetry. What this poetry expresses, however, are simple human emotions. Take the very opening scene. In beautifully fluent verse, growing free from the affectations and the aggressive ingenuity of Shakspere's earlier work, we are reminded of the familiar fact that a man of affairs, rather deeply involved, gets very anxious without knowing quite why. The vigorous verse a conventional means of expres

sion as remote as music from actual human utterance -we enjoy and forget. What we remember is that we have been put agreeably in possession of a state of things as true in Nineveh or in Wall Street as in commercial Venice, - a state of things incessant wherever men do business. Readers of Shakspere are apt to neglect, in discussing him, the obsolete conventionalism of his intrinsically noble and beautiful methods. Try to locate a blank-verse dialogue, with interspersed lyrics, in a modern stock-exchange, though, and you will find how differently Shakspere would have had to express himself had he written now. It is well for literature that he was free to use the grand conventions of Elizabethan style in setting forth his permanently human conceptions of character.

Just how these characters were conceived, of course,

no one can assert. What one knows of the way in which fiction grows nowadays, however, would warrant at least a confident guess that they were conceived by no conscious process of psychologic analysis. Writer after writer, whose actual works are of the most varying merit, agree that when they were writing the passages where their characters seem most alive, the characters generally got beyond their control, - doing and saying things which the writers never intended. The plays we have lately considered, and many still to come, agree in suggesting that some such process of spontaneously creative imagination was more probably at work in Shakspere's mind, than was any such consciously constructive method as people of small artistic experience are apt to infer from his results.

Whatever his method, there can be no doubt that it resulted in a presentation of character which may fairly be called sympathetic. In this play we instinctively sympathize with everybody. Baldly stated, Bassanio's purpose of borrowing money to make love to an heiress whose fortune shall pay his debts, is by no means that of a romantic hero; no more is Antonio's expectoratory method of manifesting distaste for the Hebrew race. As Shakspere puts these things, however, we accept them as unreservedly as we accept the graces of Portia. This heroine remains among the most charming in Shakspere, an exquisite type of that unhappily rare kind of human being who is produced only by the union of high thinking and high living. She is so dis

tinctly a person of quality that certain critics have surmised her to indicate a definite improvement in Shakspere's social position. What is perhaps more notable is that the conception of such a character involves in its creator a trait not needful to the conception of the characters we have met hitherto, - at least a sympathetic understanding of the fascination which a charming woman, with whose faults and errors you are unacquainted, can exercise. Whether anybody was ever in fact quite so altogether delightful as Portia remains in fiction, may perhaps be questioned. That many a worthy, and unworthy, woman has seemed so to adoring men is beyond doubt. About the only fault which one can fairly find with her is the fault she shares with all the other delightful people in the play. One and all, with whom our sympathy is clearly expected to go, treat Shylock, who nowadays is made almost equally sympathetic, in a manner which any modern temper must deem cruelly inhuman.

Shylock, like everybody else in the play, is presented as a human being. Distorted though his nature be by years of individual contempt and cen turies of racial persecution, he remains a man. With the exception of his first "aside" in the presence of Antonio,1 there is nothing to prevent us from taking his proposal of the monstrous bond as something like a jest on his own usurious practices; and for all his racial hatred, he seems, like many modern Hebrews, anxious for decent and familiar treatment

1 I. iii. 42-53.

by the people among whom he lives. The treatment he receives from the very Christians he has obliged, who apparently decoy him to supper that his daughter may have a chance for her thievish escapade, naturally arouses all the evil in him. His revenge, if not admirable, is most comprehensible. Not so, to modern feeling, is the contemptuously brutal treatment which he receives from the charming people with whom we are expected to sympathize fully.

To understand this, at least as it was meant, we must forget the Nineteenth Century, and revive at least two dead sentiments which in the time of Elizabeth still survived: the abhorrence of usury, and the abhorrence of the Jewish race which for centuries had been fostered by the Church. Usury, of course, remained in our own time, if indeed it be not still, a technical crime; but except in some palpably monstrous form it has never impressed any sane living man as intrinsically evil. The only people nowadays who object to the practice of lending money at interest are such envious, hateful, and malicious folk as happen to have none to lend; and generally even the taking of illegally high interest is regarded not as an essentially wicked act, but as a technically; as a malum prohibitum, like smuggling, rather than as a malum in se, like robbery or murder. In Shakspere's time, this feeling was quite reversed; people had been taught, by a thousand years of bad ecclesiastical economy, that whoever took interest on money was essentially as