the most perverse could
hesitate to admit, that there was at first sight an obvious connection
between the poison-flower--"purple from love's wound"--squeezed by Oberon
into the eyes of the sleeping Titania and the poison rubbed by Vindice
upon the skull of the murdered Gloriana. No student of Ulrici's
invaluable work would think this a far-fetched reference. That eminent
critic had verified the meaning and detected the allusion underlying many
a passage of Shakespeare in which the connection of moral idea was more
difficult to establish than this. In the fifth act of either play there
was a masque or dramatic show of a sanguinary kind; in the one case the
bloodshed was turned to merry-making, in the other the merry-making was
turned to bloodshed. Oberon's phrase, "till I torment thee for this
injury," might easily be mistaken for a quotation from the part of
Vindice. This explanation, he trusted, would suffice to exonerate his
original view from any charge of haste or rashness; especially as he had
now completely given it up, and adopted one (if possible) more
impregnably based on internal and external evidence.

Mr. C. was not unnaturally surprised and indignant to find his position
as to Romeo and Lord Burghley barely indicated, and the notice given of
the arguments by which it was supported so docked and curtailed as to
convey a most inadequate conception of their force. Among the chief
points of his argument were these: that the forsaken Rosaline was
evidently intended for the late Queen Mary, during whose reign Cecil had
notoriously conformed to the observances of her creed, though ready on
the accession of Elizabeth to throw it overboard at a day's notice; (it
was not to be overlooked that the friar on first hearing the announcement
of this change of faith is made earnestly to remonstrate, prefacing his
reproaches with an invocation of two sacred names--an invocation peculiar
to Catholics;) that the resemblance between old Capulet and Henry VIII.
is obvious to the most careless reader; his oath of "God's bread!"
immediately followed by the avowal "it makes me mad" is an unmistakable
allusion to the passions excited by the eucharistic controversy; his
violence towards Juliet at the end of the third act at once suggests the
alienation of her father's heart from the daughter of Anne Boleyn; the
self-congratulation on her own "stainless" condition as a virgin
expressed by Juliet in soliloquy (Act iii. Sc. 2) wh