able, but because "hoping in time to be advaunced from the
daughter of a poore farmer to be the wife of a riche king." Dorastus
comes to her disguised as a shepherd, and as she does not recognize him
"she began halfe to forget Dorastus and to favor this prety shepheard
whom she thought shee might both love and obtaine." It would be cruel to
make further comparisons, but it is necessary to say thus much in order
to show what a hold adventures, however crude, surprises, unexpected
meetings and recognitions, had upon Elizabethan minds. They were quite
sufficient to insure success; to add life and poetry was very well, but
by no means necessary. Shakespeare did so because he could not do
otherwise; and he did it thoroughly, as was his wont, endowing with his
life-giving faculty the most insignificant personage he found
embryo-like in Greene. The least of them has, in Shakespeare, his own
moods, his sensitiveness, a mind and a heart that is his and his alone;
even young Mamillius, the child who lives only the length of one scene,
is not any child, but tells his tale, his sad tale, with a grace that is
all his own.

"A sad tale's best for winter.
... I will tell it softly;
Yond crickets shall not hear it."

Living people, too, are his Paulina, his Antigonus, his Camillo, his
Autolycus, all of them additions of his own creation. Living also, his
shepherds, for whom he received only insignificant hints from Greene. In
"Pandosto" we hear of "a meeting of all the farmers daughters in
Sycilia," without anything more, and from this Shakespeare drew the idea
of his sheep-shearing feast, where he delights in contrasting with the
rough ways of his peasants the inborn elegance of Perdita: "O
Proserpina," says she, in her delicious mythological prattle:

"For the flowers now, that, frighted, thou lett'st fall
From Dis's wagon! daffodils,
That come before the swallow dares ..."

And Florizel, wondering at her with his young admiring eyes, answers in
the same strain:

"When you speak, sweet,
I'd have you do it ever; when you sing,
I'd have you buy and sell so; so give alms;
Pray so; and, for the ordering your affairs,
To sing them too: when you do dance, I wish you
A wave o' the sea, that you might ever do
Nothing but that."

Very different is the old shepherd's tone; though kindly, it is quite
conformable to his estate and situation:

"Fie, daught