"The quality of mercy is not strained,"
in a voice as thrilling as that in which Mademoiselle de Glapion gave the part of Mordecai. I am sure Queen Elizabeth would think our young cavaliers, well-knit and brown from the baseball-field, "right martial knights, having swart and manly countenances." If she could have seen our Antoninus, when we gave the act from Massinger's most sweet and tender tragedy of the Virgin Martyr, or the noble Caesar, in our selections from Beaumont and Fletcher's False One, she would have been as ready with the guineas as she was in the case of the son of the dean of Christ Church.
Our play at the last Commencement was Much Ado about Nothing. It was selected six months before, and studied with the material in mind, the students in the literature class, available for the different parts. What is there, thought I, in Beatrice—sprightliness covering intense womanly feeling—that our vivacious, healthful Ruth Brown cannot master; and what in Benedick, her masculine counterpart, beyond the power of Moore to conceive and render? It is chiefly girlish beauty and simple sweetness that Hero requires, so she shall be Edith Grey. Claudio, Leonato, Don John, Pedro,—we have clean-limbed, presentable fellows that will look and speak them all well; and as for lumbering Dogberry, Abbot, with his fine sense of the ludicrous, will carry it out in the best manner. A dash of the pencil here and there through the lines where Shakespeare was suiting his own time, and not the world as it was to be after three hundred refining years, and the marking out of a few scenes that could be spared from the action, and the play was ready; trimmed a little, but with not a whit taken from its sparkle or pathos, and all its lovelier poetry untouched.
Then came long weeks of drill. In the passage,
"O my lord,
When you went onward to this ended action,
I looked upon her with a soldier's eye," etc.,
Claudio caught the fervour and softness at last, and seemed (it would have pleased Queen Bess better than Madame de Main tenon) like Palamon, in love indeed. Ursula and Hero rose easily to the delicate poetry of the passages that begin,
"The pleasantest angling is to see the fish
Cut with her golden oars the silver stream,"
and
"Look where Beatrice like a lapwing runs."
Pedro got to perfection his turn and gesture in