is sweet only to the inexperienced, presents, in illustration, a butterfly fluttering towards a candle.

La guerre doulce aux inexperimentez.

Corrozet, 1540.

Les Papillons fe vont brufler
A la chandelle qui reluyet.
Tel veult à la bataille aller
Qui ne fcaict combien guerre nuyet.

"The Butterflies themselves are about to burn,

In the candle which still shines on and warms;

Such foolish, wish to battle fields to turn,

Who know not of the war, how much it harms."

This device, in fact, was one extremely popular with the Emblem literati. Boissard and Messin's Emblems, 1588, pp. 58, 59, present it to the mottoes, "Temerité dangereuse," or Temere ac Periculose,-" rashly and dangerously." Joachim Camerarius, in his Emblems Ex Volatilibus et Insectis (Nuremberg, 4to, 1596), uses it, with the motto, Brevis et damnosa Voluptas-" A short and destructive pleasure," and fortifies himself in adopting it by no less authorities than Æschylus and Aristotle. Emblemes of Love, with

Verses in Latin, English, and Italian, by Otho Vænius, 4to, Antwerp, 1608, present Cupid to us, at p. 102, as watching the moths and the flames with great earnestness, the mottoes being, Brevis et damnosa voluptas,-"For one pleasure a thousand paynes," and Breue gioia, - "Brief the gladness."

There is, too, on the same subject, the elegant device which Symeoni gives at p. 25 of his "DISTICHI MORALI," and which we repeat on the next page.

The subject is, Of Love too much; and the motto, "Too much pleasure leads to death," is thus set forth, almost literally, by English rhymes :

Now can there be unreasonableness in supposing that out of these many Emblem writers Shakespeare may have had some

one in view when he ascribed to Portia the words,

"Thus hath the candle singed the moth.

O, these deliberate fools! when they do choose,

They have the wisdom by their wit to lose."

Act ii. sc. 9, lines 79-81.

The opening of the third of the caskets (act. iii. sc. 2, l. 115, vol. ii. p. 328), that made of lead, is also as much an Emblem delineation as the other two, excelling them, indeed, in the beauty of the language as well as in the excellence of the device, a very paragon of gracefulness. "What find I here?" demands Bassanio; and himself replies,

"Fair Portia's counterfeit ! What demi-god

Hath come so near creation? Move these eyes?

Or whether, riding on the balls of mine

Seem they in motion? Here are sever'd lips,
Parted with sugar breath: so sweet a bar

Should sunder such sweet friends. Here in her hairs
The painter plays the spider, and hath woven
A golden mesh to entrap the hearts of men,
Faster than gnats in cobwebs : * but her eyes,-
How could he see to do them? Having made one,
Methinks it should have power to steal both his,
And leave itself unfurnish'd. Yet look, how far
The substance of my praise doth wrong this shadow
In underprizing it, so far this shadow

Doth limp behind the substance. Here's a scroll,
The continent and summary of my fortune.
[Reads] You that choose not by the view,

Chance as fair, and choose as true!
Since this fortune falls to you,

Be content and seek no new.

If you will be pleased with this,

And hold your fortune for your bliss,

Turn you where your lady is,

And claim her with a loving kiss."

In these scenes of the casket, Shakespeare himself, therefore, is undoubtedly an Emblem writer; and there needs only the

In the work of Joachim Camerarius, just quoted, at p. 152, to the motto, "VIOLENTIOR EXIT,"-The more violent escapes, p. 99,-there is the device of Gnats and Wasps in a cobweb, with the stanza,—

"Innodat culicem, sed vespa pervia tela est;
Sic rumpit leges vis, quibus hæret inops."
"The gnat the web entangles, but to the wasp
Throughout is pervious; so force breaks laws,
To which the helpless is held bound in chains."

woodcut, or the engraving, to render them as perfect examples of Emblem writing as any that issued from the pens of Alciatus, Symeoni, and Beza. The dramatist may have been sparing in his use of this tempting method of illustration, yet, with the instances before us, we arrive at the conclusion that Shakespeare knew well what Emblems were. And surely he had seen, and in some degree studied, various portions of the Emblem literature which was anterior to, or contemporary with himself.

CHAPTER V.

SIX DIRECT REFERENCES IN THE PERICLES TO BOOKS OF EMBLEMS, SOME OF THEIR DEVICES DESCRIBED, AND OF THEIR MOTTOES QUOTED.

HAKESPEARE'S name, in three quarto editions, published during his lifetime, appears as author of the play of Pericles, Prince of Tyre; and if a decision be made that the authorship belongs to him, and that in the main the work was his composition, then our previous conjectures are changed into certainties, and we can confidently declare who were the Emblem writers he refers to, and can exhibit the very passages from their books which he has copied and adopted.

The early folio editions of the plays, those of 1623 and 1632, omit the Pericles altogether, but later editions restore it to a place among the works of Shakespeare. Dr. Farmer contends that the hand of the great dramatist is visible only in the last act; but others controvert this opinion, and maintain, though he was not the fabricator of the plot, nor the author of every dialogue and chorus, that his genius is evident in several passages.

In Knight's Pictorial Shakspere, supplemental volume, p. 13, we are informed: "The first edition of Pericles appeared in 1609," -several years before the dramatist's death,-" under the following title, 'The late and much admired play, called Pericles, Prince of Tyre, &c. By William Shakespeare: London, Glosson, 1609."