he lake?--that he hisses and
croaks most unmusical, most melancholy?--and that he gathers all unclean
garbage for his food--newts, and frogs, and crawling worms? In short,
that though, in his pride, and grandeur, and passionate energy, he is
the Tyrant of Olympus, he is, in many other respects, an animal not
greatly to be admired--by no means comparable as a dish at Christmas to
a well-fed goose, or even a couple of ducks. For reading aloud to ladies
after tea, I prefer _Ion_ to _Othello_. And now, my excellent friend, I
will tell you the reason--not why I prefer _Ion_, which, though I have
introduced it in this flippant manner, I consider a very beautiful and
poetical drama--but why no play of Shakspeare is fit to be read to a
party of ladies after tea. It is this--that ladies, in one sense of the
word, were as unknown in Shakspeare's days as tea. There were certain
human beings that wore petticoats, and, in due course of time, fulfilled
the original command, and died; but, shades of Hannah More and Anne
Seward! to call them ladies would be as absurd as to call Dulcinea del
Tobosa a princess of the blood. A friend of mine--a well-known
non-commissioned officer in the Devil's Own--told me this story, which I
mention to you, my dear Smith, in strict confidence, in case the heroine
of the anecdote should find that her confession is made known. An old
lady--properly so called, both as respects the adjective and the noun,
for she was past eighty, and was refined and pure--astonished my friend,
by asking him one day to try and get a volume or two for her of the
works of Assa Behn. He did so--no little wondering at such a choice of
books--and in a day the novel was returned, "I send you back these
volumes," she said, "as I am unable to get through the first. Is it not
strange that I, an old woman, sitting in my own room, am positively
ashamed and disgusted at the scenes and conversations which were read
aloud to me in mixed companies, without a blush or shudder, when I was
eighteen?"

Now, in Shakspeare's time, there was no female in the land that would
have stumbled at the grossest passages in Assa Behn. The tenderness,
delicacy, and beauty of the feminine character were still in the future
tense; and, therefore, it is not a matter of surprise that the female
characters in Shakspeare were original _creations_, and not transcripts
from human life. For the time and the state of society when the plays
were written, they are ins