er! when my old wife lived, upon
This day she was both pantler, butler, cook,
Both dame and servant; welcomed all, served all,
Would sing her song, and dance her turn; now here,
At upper end o' the table, now i' the middle;
On his shoulder and his; her face o' fire
With labour, and the thing she took to quench it,
She would to each one sip. You are retired,
As if you were a feasted one, and not
The hostess of the meeting."

Never has the language of country people been better transferred to
literature; their manners, tone, and language in Shakespeare have
remained true to nature even to the present day, so much so that it is
difficult, while writing, not to think of harvest and vintage scenes,
which every year brings round again in our French valleys, and the sort
of kindly talk very similar to the old shepherd's that many of us
remember, as well as I do, to have heard in the country, from peasant
associates in early days. This unsurpassed fidelity to nature is the
more remarkable as it dates from the Arcadian times of English
literature, days that were to last long, even down to the time of Pope
and of Thomson himself, to stop at Burns, when at last a deeper, if not
truer, note was to be struck.

But with regard to mere facts, Shakespeare was in no way more careful
than Greene, and he seems to have known, and it was in fact visible
enough, the greediness of his public to be such that, ostrich like, they
would swallow anything. He, therefore, changed very little. In Greene,
ships "sail into Bohemia," a feat that cannot be repeated to-day; the
Queen is tried by a jury "panelled" for that purpose; the nobles go "to
the isle of Delphos, there to enquire of the oracle of Apollo whether
she had committed adultery." Very much the same things happen in
Shakespeare. The survival of Hermione is his own invention; in Greene
she dies for good at the beginning of the novel, when she hears of the
death of her son. With the same aptitude to die for no other cause than
to improve a story, Pandosto dies also in Greene's tale: he remembered
his faults and "fell in a melancholie fit, and to close up the comedie
with a tragicall stratageme he slewe himselfe." Merry and tragical! But
otherwise Dorastus and Fawnia would have had to wait before becoming
king and queen, and such a waiting was against the taste of the time and
the rules of novel writing.

Such as it is, Greene's tale had an ext