himself for her deliverance. But it is Alcestis who gives to the play its undying glory, and nowhere is she more glorious than in commending her children to her husband just before she dies.

The Romans, in their better days, had a higher respect for women than had the Athenians, but the drama of Rome is too unoriginal in character to detain us. Shakespeare has left us a number of pictures of mothers. Lady Capulet is but slightly sketched, and in a comic spirit. There are several mothers in the ranting chronicle plays of Henry VI, such as Elizabeth of York and Margaret of Anjou. Of later date, yet not free from the blustering manner of these earlier plays, is the Constance in the play of King John, the mother of John's nephew and rival, Prince Arthur, a gentle and affectionate lad, destitute of the powerful energy and ambition which alone could have won him the crown of England and thereby saved his life from his wicked uncle. The task of upholding his cause devolves upon his mother, who pleads his cause before the King of France, and the archduke of Austria with courage, with pride, and alas with bitterness. Majestic and pathetic as she is, she has no arts of diplomacy or persuasion. With an irrepressible pride that cannot recognize defeat, she asserts her son's dignity, with stormy eloquence, but without useful result. The scenes in which she and Eleanor, the mother and champion of King John, scold each other are in the ranting vein of Marlowe. Shakespeare may not have written all of the play as it has reached us, or if he did, his genius had by no means ripened.

It is interesting to find that the most delicately beautiful lines in the play, the dialogue between Arthur and Hubert, and the elegant compliment beginning

To gild refinèd gold, to paint the lily,

He

are spoken by men and not by women. Shakespeare had hardly yet associated with high-bred women. was more impressed with the dramatic possibilities of the village goodies who sat in the dust and scolded each other with all possible intemperance.

Gertrude, the mother of Hamlet, on the other hand, is a finished and masterly portrait. She has been unfaithful to her husband during his life, though not an accessory before the fact of his murder. Her easy self-indulgent nature readily persuades her that now she has married her paramour, Hamlet's uncle, the past is of little import. But though destitute of moral ideals, she is by no means destitute of attractive sentiment. Her fidelity to her son is a main embarrassment to her husband. Her affection for Ophelia is wholly sweet and pleasing. Her insensibility to the merits of her first husband, the father whose memory Hamlet so passionately revered and loved, is the source of the heavy cloud that rests upon the soul of the Prince of Denmark, inhibiting his will, and deranging his intellect. For modern literature contains no more beautiful picture of moral sensibility than Hamlet. But when at last he succeeds in rousing the slumbering conscience of his mother, she unhesitatingly espouses his cause, keeps his confidence, and perishes with his name upon her lips.

Volumnia, the mother of Coriolanus, is the most motherly, in her stern, antique Roman way, of all Shakespeare's portraits of motherhood. Hardly less intense than the Constance already mentioned, Volumnia is vastly more real; for she is no merely animated form of a single passion, but a human being moved by patrician pride, and by steadfast patriotism as well as by maternal ambition. Occasionally, too, she shows a flash of penetrating intelligence, particularly when she directs her son how to assume the appearance of humility in the presence of the plebeians whom both mother and son really despise:

Thy knee bussing the stones- for in such business
Action is eloquence, and the eyes of the ignorant
More learned than their ears—

The haughty patrician cannot understand kindness to a lower caste. But she knows their weakness, and knows, too, how to make her exhortations all but persuasive to her incorrigible son. The character of Volumnia is a truly admirable example of Shakespeare's historic sense, showing how genius, aided by small Latin and less Greek - for he never went beyond North's translation of Plutarch for his storycan catch the spirit of one who lived in a distant age.

The age of Coriolanus and Volumnia was one of very simple militarism. Volumnia's every boast is of her son's physical courage and strength. Living in our own age of feminism she would have been the first to proclaim that great men have great mothers. "Thy valiantness was mine, thou suck'dst it from

me," she says. She glories even in her son's wounds, being intellectual enough to regard them as mere evidence of his greatness: "O he is wounded; I thank the gods for it," she cries, for "On's brows he comes the third time home with the oaken garland." She also boasts of her grandson: "He had rather see the swords and hear a drum beat than look upon his schoolmaster." But underneath the haughty spirit that ever values her son's glory more than his safety there is ever the insistent fondness of a mother. This is expressed to the life when kneeling before him "with no softer cushion than the flint" she implores him to spare his native city, now at his mercy:

Thou hast never in thy life
Show'd thy dear mother any courtesy,

When she, poor hen, fond of no second brood,
Has cluck'd thee to the wars and safely home,
Loaden with honor.

An interesting picture of a woman who has spoiled her son not by cosseting or softening him, but by inflaming his pride and his courage.

In recent drama, the German, Gerhart Hauptmann, has given us a powerful play in The Rats. There is a double plot of which only one part, the tragedy of Mrs. John, the mason's wife, need concern us. Mrs. John has lost a baby, to her inconsolable sorrow. During a long absence of her husband from home a Polish servant girl gives birth to an illegitimate child, whose father is Mrs. John's brutal brother, Bruno Mechelke. Bruno is not disposed to assume the re