All night and part of the next day did the haughty-looking Spaniard burn, till she was consumed to the water's edge, and then, as the Falcon neared her, there arose ever and anon a column of smoke from the rolling sea, consequent upon the close decks, full of spices, exploding under water, and which the fire had not taken hold of.
CHAPTER XXXV.
MORE MATTER FOR A MAY MORNING.
Stratford-upon-Avon, like most country towns, possessed at this period, amongst other and worthier inhabitants, a certain amount of fragments, who were indeed in themselves nothing, but who wished to make themselves, as they fancied themselves, something.
Those stuck-up portions of humanity, besides being extremely chaste in their ideas of propriety, were perhaps the most intolerant and unforgiving Christians in the world.
Brotherly love and charity were as often and as forcible in their mouths as real humanity was wanting in their hearts. Did a poor maiden err, and allowed her failing to be discovered, she was to be utterly cast out, abandoned, destroyed—no redemption allowed. Did a youth but shew the germs of a generous spirit, and fling out never so little, he was to be hunted down as one of the wild and wicked, irrecoverably disowned, and driven from society. Such folks are, as we have said, always to be found in a small community of citizens—the unwholesome impurity which circulates in its veins and arteries, and poisons by degrees the stream of its life.
Should any of these envious censors happen to observe one whom they consider of mark and likelihood beyond the common herd, they endeavour to make shipwreck of such superiority, by nipping it in the bud. They feel conscious of their own common-place inferiority. They know themselves in reality nothing, and they resolve to reduce, if they can, the superiority of others to their own level, or to trample and destroy it utterly, if possible.
"Such a commodity of warm slaves" in Stratford had for some time looked with evil eye upon young Shakespeare. There was a superiority about him which, as it was more observable to their envy, they could by no means behold with quietude. They regarded him with a rankling dislike, and received, invented, or promulgated with avidity any thing they could gather to his disadvantage.
Our readers will perhaps think it odd, that one so young should already have found enemies in his native town. They will, however, remember, that "Envy always dogs merit at the heels," and that Shakespeare, as he was no common person, was at the same time the most open, generous, and unsuspicious of mortals—a man likely to expose himself to censure, and care little about it either.