nd softly whispering in my ear, "Sweet lady,
Your cousin there will do me detriment
He little dreams of: he's absorbed, I see,
In my old name and fame--be sure he'll leave
My Mildred, when his best account of me
Is ended, in full confidence I wear
My grandsire's periwig down either cheek.
I'm lost unless your gentleness vouchsafes"....

_Tresham._ ... "To give a best of best accounts, yourself,
Of me and my demerits." You are right!
He should have said what now I say for him.
Yon golden creature, will you help us all?
Here's Austin means to vouch for much, but you
--You are ... what Austin only knows! Come up,
All three of us: she's in the library
No doubt, for the day's wearing fast. Precede!

_Guendolen._ Austin, how we must--!

_Tresham._ Must what? Must speak truth,
Malignant tongue! Detect one fault in him!
I challenge you!

_Guendolen._ Witchcraft's a fault in him,
For you're bewitched.

_Tresham._ What's urgent we obtain
Is, that she soon receive him--say, to-morrow--
Next day at furthest.

_Guendolen._ Ne'er instruct me!

_Tresham._ Come!
--He's out of your good graces, since forsooth,
He stood not as he'd carry us by storm
With his perfections! You're for the composed
Manly assured becoming confidence!
--Get her to say, "to-morrow," and I'll give you ...
I'll give you black Urganda, to be spoiled
With petting and snail-paces. Will you? Come!

The story of the love of Mildred and Mertoun is the universally human
one, and belongs to no one country or no one period of civilization more
than another, but the attitude of all the actors in the tragedy belongs
distinctively to the phase of moral culture which we saw illustrated in
the youth of Sir Philip Sidney, and is characteristic of English ways of
thinking whenever their moral force comes uppermost, as for example in
the Puritan thought of the Cromwellian era.

The play is in a sense a problem play, though to most modern readers the
tragedy of its ending is all too horrible a consequence of the sin.
Dramatically and psychically, however, the tragedy is much more
inevitable than that of Romeo and Juliet, whose love one naturally
thinks of in the same connection. The catastrophe in the Shakespeare
play is almost mechanically pushed to its conclusion through mere
external blundering, easily to have be