THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.

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more willing to do them a kindness than to have it known. The first will caress their friends and then desert them. The second will abuse their friends, and then imperil their lives to serve them. Kate belongs to that class of women who will never allow their husbands to govern them if they can help it, nor ever respect their husbands unless they do govern them; who, unsubdued, will do their worst to plague them, but who once subdued will do their utmost to please them. There seems to be a desire with some women to try to prove their husbands and to know them, whether they be what they call genuine pieces of manhood or not. Petruchio’s treatment therefore rather reforms the conduct than the character of his wife, rather brings out the good which she seemed to want than to remove the bad which she seemed to have. After marriage there are no traces of the shrew in her conduct. One writer naively says, her sense of duty in the relation dissipates all her artificial life and straightens her behavior. All the materials of her closing speech are in her heart all the while, but she disdains to let them out, and it is not until Petruchio forces them out that she stands before us in her true character. Still the tender and considerate husband is all the while lurking under his affected willfulness. Some writers think that Petruchio falsifies himself more than Kate does because he has more to falsify. He is himself all truth, yet utters nothing but lies; full of kindness and good-nature, he will put on the garb of a fiend to do the work of a benefactor. “He will at any time say more and do fewer bad things than any other man in Italy.” He now proceeds to work out of Kate what seems to others the plainest impossibility by the wildest contradic­tion. “ Say that she rails; why then I’ll tell her plain she sings.” His outrageous^ humor reached at once its height when riding with his wife he visits her father, he meets old Vincentio, and requires him to salute her as a beautiful lady.

“ Tell me, sweet Kate, and tell me truly true,

Hast thou beheld a fresher gentlewoman?”

Thus do we see, as if by magic, Kate the cursed presently become the most loyal of wives. We have not a grain of pity to spare for Kate, who is better pleased to find a conqueror than to be the conqueror. On the whole it is satisfactory to her to dis­cover that there is at least one man of force and spirit in the world, and to know that he, and no other, has chosen her for his wife; and so Kate transfers all her boldness to the very effrontery of obedience. Behind her delightful sauciness lie warmth and courage at heart. Strange that Shakespeare should have known so long ago that which most people still find so hard to learn. We behold in the great bard’s wonder­ful magic mirrors that his heroines are more perfectly feminine than any woman could have found it in her heart or brain to make them. Woman, as she resembles man, was of less consequence to Shakespeare than woman in herself. Shakespeare says:

“ Here woman stands, the modern world stooping at her feet will have to yield some of the reputed exclusiveness of men, but only such traits of it as Imogene, Cordelia, Beatrice or Portia will elect.” In dealing with married love Shakespeare, ever true to nature, gives it no rhapsodies or flowers of speech. It may be a love that over­whelms a man’s whole nature, as with Othello, when he exclaimed after an enforced absence, and looking into his wife’s face:

“If it were now to die, ’twere now to be most happy.”

Or Brutus, comforting his wife when she desires to know the secret that is oppress­ing him:

“Am I yourself but as it were in sort of limitation,

To keep with you at meals, comfort your bed,

And talk to you sometimes? Dwell I but in the suburbs Of your good pleasure? If it be no more,

Portia is Brutus’ harlot, not his wife.”

and his answer is full of profound, earnest, sad truth:

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