political principles,' writes:

'Mazzini's concern for the rights of man was never, on any pretext, in a
purely masculine sense. Years ago he inculcated the equality of the
sexes in regard to all civil and political immunities. _Largely indebted
to his mother for the grand impulses which led him to consecrate his
life to the service of his country, his generic respect for woman
amounted almost to sanctitude: it was the embodiment of all that is
tender in affection, fragrant in purity, devout in aspiration, and
self-sacrificing in love.'_

It has never been a matter of much regret to me that so little is known
of Shakespeare's personal history--the circumstances of his outer life.
Of what his interior life was, we can have no doubt. It must have been a
life capable of sympathetically reproducing within itself all the great
characters, men and women, of the Dramas. But if I could wear the
wishing-cap of Fortunatus, I would wish to know what manner of woman, in
all particulars, was Mary Arden, the poet's mother. The men whose
intellectual and, more especially, spiritual gifts to the world, have
been the greatest, and most quickening, have oftener, no doubt, been
more indebted, for those gifts, to their mothers than to their fathers.
The radiant shapes of the women of Shakespeare's Dramas certainly had
their source in the feminine element, the _ewig weibliche_, of his
nature, and this element was as certainly, I cannot but think, derived
from, and quickened by, his mother. In what was, without doubt, his
earliest play, Love's Labor's Lost, Biron, I am quite sure, expresses
Shakespeare's own opinion of the peculiar power of women (A. IV. S.
III.):

From women's eyes this doctrine I derive:
They sparkle still the right Promethean fire;
They are the books, the arts, the academes,
That show, contain, and nourish all the world.

This was as certainly Shakespeare's own opinion about woman as what
Biron says (A. I. S. I.) was his own opinion about study:

Study is like the heaven's glorious sun,
That will not be deep-search'd with saucy looks;
Small have continual plodders ever won,
Save base authority from others' books.
These earthly godfathers of heaven's lights,
That give a name to every fixed star,
Have no more profit of their shining nights
Than those that walk and wot not what they are.
Too much to know is to know nought but fame;
And every godfather