eam of.

IX.

SHREWS.

The greatest masters who ever made studies of the shrew in fiction or
in history have never, after all, given us a strictly scientific
definition of the creature. They let her exhibit herself in all her
drollery or her hatefulness, but they act in somewhat lordly fashion
by leaving us to frame our definition from the picturesque data which
they supply. Mrs. Mackenzie, in "The Newcomes," is repulsive to an
awful degree, but the figure is as true as true can be, and most of
us, no doubt, have seen the type in all its loathsomeness only too
many times. Mrs. Mackenzie is a shrew of one sort, but we could not
take her vile personality as the basis of a classification. Mrs.
Raddle is one of that lower middle-class which Dickens knew so well,
still she is not hateful or vile, or anything but droll. I know how
maddening that kind of woman can be in real life to those immediately
about her, but onlookers find her purely funny; they never think of
poor Bob Sawyer's cruel humiliation; they only laugh themselves
helpless over the screeching little woman on the stairs, who humbles
her wretched consort and routs the party with such consummate
strategy. Mrs. Raddle and Mrs. Mackenzie are as far apart as two
creatures may be; nevertheless they are veritable specimens of the
British shrew, and it should be within the resources of civilisation
to find a definition capable of fitting both of them. As for Queen
Elizabeth--that splendid, false, able, cruel, and inexorable
shrew--she requires the space of volumes to give even the shadow of
her personality and powers. She has puzzled some of the wisest and
most learned of men. She was truly royal, and wholly deceitful;
self-controlled at times, and madly passionate at others; a lover of
pure literature, and yet terribly free in her own writings; kind to
her dependants, yet capable of aiming a violent blow at some courtier
whom she had caressed a moment before the blow came; an icy virgin,
and a confirmed and audacious flirt; a generous mistress, and an
odious miser; a free giver to those near her, and a skinflint who let
the sailors who saved her country lie rotting to death in the open
streets of Ramsgate because she could not find in her heart to give
them either medical attendance or shelter. Was there ever such another
being known beneath the glimpses of the moon? Some might call her
superhuman; I am more inclined to regard her as inhuman, for her
blend