rink," Cassio commends the excellence of the ditty.
Thereupon Iago explains: "I learned it in England, where indeed
they are most potent in potting; Your Dane, your German, and
your swag-bellied Hollander--drink, ho!--are nothing to your
English." Cassio asks: "Is your Englishman so expert in his drinking?"
Iago retorts: "Why, he drinks you, with facility, your Dane dead
drunk," and gains, the speaker explains, easy mastery over the German
and the Hollander.

A further stroke of Shakespeare's social criticism hits the
thoughtless pursuit of novelty, which infected the nation and found
vent in Shakespeare's day in the patronage of undignified shows and
sports. When Trinculo, perplexed by the outward aspect of the hideous
Caliban, mistakes him for a fish, he remarks: "Were I in England now,
as once I was, and had but this fish painted, not a holiday fool there
but would give a piece of silver: there would this monster make a man;
any strange beast there makes a man: when they will not give a doit to
relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian."

Shakespeare seems slyly to confess a personal conviction of defective
balance in the popular judgment when he makes the first grave-digger
remark that Hamlet was sent into England because he was mad.

"He shall recover his wits there," the old clown suggests, "or if he
do not, 'tis no great matter there."

"Why?" asks Hamlet.

"'Twill not be seen in him there; there the men are as mad as he."

So, too, in the emphatically patriotic play of _Henry V._, Shakespeare
implies that he sees some purpose in the Frenchman's jibes at the
foggy, raw, and dull climate of England, which engenders in its
inhabitants, the Frenchman argues, a frosty temperament, an ungenial
coldness of blood. Nor does the dramatist imply dissent from the
French marshal's suggestion that Englishmen's great meals of beef
impair the efficiency of their intellectual armour. The point of the
reproof is not blunted by the subsequent admission of a French critic
in the same scene to the effect that, however robustious and rough in
manner Englishmen may be, they have the unmatchable courage of the
English breed of mastiffs. To credit men with the highest virtues of
which dogs are capable is a grudging compliment.

V

To sum up. The Shakespearean drama enjoins those who love their
country wisely to neglect no advantage that nature offers in the way
of resisting unjust demands upon it; to