and he would be fifty at the close. He speaks, in his first scene, of
his boyhood as only twenty-three years gone, when his dagger was worn
"muzzled, lest it should bite its master"--at which time he may have
been ten years old; certainly not more, probably less. His words, toward
the end of act third, "so sure as this beard's gray," refer to the beard
of Antigonus, not to his own. He is a young man when the play begins,
and Polixenes is about the same age, and Hermione is a young woman.
Antigonus and Paulina are middle-aged persons in the earlier scenes and
Paulina is an elderly woman in the statue scene--almost an old woman,
though not too old to be given in marriage to old Camillo, the
ever-faithful friend. In Mary Anderson's presentation of _A Winter's
Tale_ those details received thoughtful consideration and correct
treatment.

In Hermione is seen a type of the celestial nature in woman--infinite
love, infinite charity, infinite patience. Such a nature is rare; but it
is possible, it exists, and Shakespeare, who depicted everything, did
not omit to portray that. To comprehend Hermione the observer must
separate her, absolutely and finally, from association with the
passions. Mrs. Jameson acutely and justly describes her character as
exhibiting "dignity without pride, love without passion, and tenderness
without weakness." That is exactly true. Hermione was not easily won,
and the best thing known about Leontes is that at last she came to love
him and that her love for him survived his cruel and wicked treatment,
chastened him, reinstated him, and ultimately blessed him. Hermione
suffers the utmost affliction that a good woman can suffer. Her boy
dies, heart-broken, at the news of his mother's alleged disgrace. Her
infant daughter is torn from her breast and cast forth to perish. Her
husband becomes her enemy and persecutor. Her chastity is assailed and
vilified. She is subjected to the bitter indignity of a public trial. It
is no wonder that at last her brain reels and she falls as if stricken
dead. The apparent anomaly is her survival for sixteen years, in lonely
seclusion, and her emergence, after that, as anything but a forlorn
shadow of her former self. The poet Shelley has recorded the truth that
all great emotions either kill themselves or kill those who feel them.
It is here, however, that the exceptional temperament of Hermione
supplies an explanatory and needed qualification. Her emotions are never
of a p