ing of characteristics is not like anything ever seen before or
since among the children of men. She was a shrew--a magnificent,
enigmatic shrew, who was perhaps the more fitted to rule a kingdom
which was in a state of transition in that she was lacking in all
sense of pity, shame, or remorse. She was the apotheosis of the shrew,
and no one of the tribe can ever be like unto her again. Carlyle's
Termagant of Spain is a shadowy figure that flits through all the
note-books on Frederick, but we never get so near to her as we do to
Elizabeth, and she remains to us as a vast shape that gibbers and
threatens and gesticulates in the realms of the dead. Jael, the wife
of Heber the Kenite, must have been a terrible shrew, and I should
think that Heber was not master in the house where Sisera died. The
calm deliberation, the preliminary coaxing, the quick, cool
determination, and the final shrill exultation which was reflected in
Deborah's song all speak of the shrew. Thackeray had a morbid delight
in dwelling on the species, and we know that all of his portraits were
taken from real life. If he really was intimate with all of the cruel
figures that he draws, then I could pardon him for manifesting the
most ferocious of cynicisms even if he had been a cynic--which he was
not. The Campaigner, Mrs. Clapp, the landlady in "Vanity Fair," Mrs.
Baynes, and all the rest of the deplorable bevy rest like nightmares
upon our memory. Dickens always made the shrew laughable, so that we
can hardly spare pity for the poor Snagsbys and Raddles and Crupps, or
any of her victims in that wonderful gallery; but Thackeray's,
Trollope's, Charles Reade's, Mrs. Oliphant's, and even Miss
Broughton's shrews are always odious, and they all seem to start from
the page alive.

But I am not minded to deal with the special instances of shrewism
which have been pronounced enough to claim attention from powerful
masters of fiction and history; I am rather interested in the swarms
of totally commonplace shrews who live around us, and who do their
very best--or worst--to make the earth a miserable place. I can laugh
as heartily as anybody at Dickens's "scolds" and female bullies; none
the less however am I ready in all seriousness to reckon the shrew as
an evil influence, as bad as some of the most subtle and malevolent
scourges inflicted by physical nature. All of us have but a little
span on earth, and we should be able to economise every minute, so as
to ext