ell remember in her behalf, that love's
"favourite seat is feeble woman's breast"; especially as there is not
a particle of evidence that her life after marriage was ever otherwise
than clear and honourable. And indeed it will do no hurt to remember
in reference to them both, how

"'Tis affirmed
By poets skilled in Nature's secret ways,
That Love will not submit to be controlled
By mastery."

In support of his view, Mr. White urges, among other things, that most
foul and wicked fling which Leontes, in his mad rapture of jealousy,
makes against his wife, in Act i. scene 2, of _The Winter's Tale_. He
thinks the Poet could not have written that and other strains of like
import, but that he was stung into doing so by his own bitter
experience of "sorrow and shame"; and the argument is that, supposing
him to have had such a root of bitterness in his life, he must have
been thinking of that while writing those passages. The obvious answer
is, To be sure, he must have been thinking of that; but then he must
have known that others would think of it too; and a reasonable
delicacy on his part would have counselled the withholding of any
thing that he was conscious might be applied to his own domestic
affairs. Sensible men do not write in their public pages such things
as would be almost sure to breed or foster scandal about their own
names or their own homes. The man that has a secret cancer on his
person will naturally be the last to speak of cancers in reference to
others. I can hardly think Shakespeare was so wanting in a sense of
propriety as to have written the passages in question, but that he
knew no man could say he was exposing the foulness of his own nest. So
that my inferences in the matter are just the reverse of Mr. White's.
As for the alleged need of personal experience in order to the writing
of such things, why should not this hold just as well in regard, for
instance, to Lady Macbeth's pangs of guilt? Shakespeare's prime
characteristic was, that he knew the truth of Nature in all such
things without the help of personal experience.

Mr. White presumes, moreover, that Anne Shakespeare was a coarse, low,
vulgar creature, such as, the fascination of the honeymoon once worn
off, the Poet could not choose but loath and detest; and that his
betaking himself to London was partly to escape from her hated
society. This, too, is all sheer conjecture, and rather lame at that.
That