The tyrannies of petty law hurt the authority of the State more with the populace than all the severity of a Draconian code against great offences. Petty laws may annoy but can never harm the rich, for they can always evade them or purchase immunity; but petty laws for the poor are as the horse-fly on the neck and on the eyelids of the horse.
It was in the month of April; outside the walls and on the banks of Tiber, still swollen by the floods of winter, one could see the gold of a million daffodils and the bright crimson and yellow of tulips in the green corn. The scent of flowers and herbs came into the town and filled its dusky and narrow ways; the boatmen had green branches fastened to their masts; in the stillness of evening one heard the song of crickets, and even a mosquito would come and blow his shrill little trumpet, and one was willing to say to him "Welcome!" because on his little horn he blew the glad news, "Summer is here!"
HELD IN BONDAGE.
"A young man married is a man that's marred." That's a golden rule, Arthur; take it to heart. Anne Hathaway, I have not a doubt, suggested it; experience is the sole asbestos, only unluckily one seldom gets it before one's hands are burnt irrevocably. Shakespeare took to wife the ignorant, rosy-cheeked Warwickshire peasant girl at eighteen! Poor fellow! I picture him, with all his untried powers, struggling like new-born Hercules for strength and utterance, and the great germ of poetry within him, tingeing all the common realities of life with its rose hue; genius giving him power to see with god-like vision the "fairies nestling in the cowslip chalices," and the golden gleam of Cleopatra's sails; to feel the "spiced Indian air" by night, and the wild working of kings' ambitious lust; to know by intuition, alike the voices of nature unheard by common ears, and the fierce schemes and passions of a world from which social position shut him out! I picture him in his hot, imaginative youth, finding his first love in the yeoman's daughter at Shottery, strolling with her by the Avon, making her an "odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds," and dressing her up in the fond array of a boy's poetic imaginings! Then—when he had married her, he, with the passionate ideals of Juliets and Violas, Ophelias and Hermiones in his brain and heart, must have awakened to find that the voices so sweet to him were dumb to her. The "cinque spotted cowslip bells" brought only thoughts of wine to her. When he was watching "certain stars shoot madly from their spheres," she most likely was grumbling at him for mooning there after curfew bell. When he was learning Nature's lore in "the fresh cup of the crimson rose," she was dinning in his ear that Hammet and Judith wanted worsted socks. When he was listening in fancy to the "sea-maid's song," and weaving thoughts to which a world still stands reverentially to listen, she was buzzing behind him, and bidding him go card the wool, and weeping that, in her girlhood, she had not chosen some rich glover or ale-taster, instead of idle, useless, wayward Willie Shakespeare. Poor fellow! He did not write, I would swear, without fellow-feeling, and yearning over souls similarly shipwrecked, that wise saw, "A young man married is a man that's marred."
PASCARÈL.
When a man's eyes meet yours, and his faith trusts you, and his heart upon a vague impulse is laid bare to you, it always has seemed to me the basest treachery the world can hold to pass the gold of confidence which he pours out to you from hand to hand as common coin for common circulation.