If I were to sum by a single inanimate object the temper and tradition of Dr. Furness, I would turn to the gloves, in his unrivaled collection, which one is glad to believe were Shakspere’s. They are manifestly the gloves of an Elizabethan gentleman not too large in build, gold-embroidered, and shapely. They were treasured as genuine by the descendants of Shakspere’s son-in-law, the physician who attended him in his last illness, and were handed down in that family. They passed to Garrick, who gave them to Philip Kemble, and so by descent again they passed from Fanny Kemble to their recent owner. There again is the double line of grace, the descent both of line and of genius, to make precious the gloves that rested on Shakspere’s hand, took its shape and knew its strength and beauty.
[5] The plays edited by Dr. Furness are “Romeo and Juliet,” 1871; “Macbeth,” 1873; “Hamlet,” two volumes, 1877; “King Lear,” 1880; “Othello,” 1886; “The Merchant of Venice,” 1888; “As You Like It,” 1890; “The Tempest,” 1892; “Midsummer-Night’s Dream,” 1895; “The Winter’s Tale,” 1898; “Much Ado about Nothing,” 1899; “Twelfth Night,” 1901; “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” 1904; “Antony and Cleopatra,” 1909, and “Cymbeline,” completed and to appear. His son Horace Howard Furness, Jr., will complete his father’s task, and has already published “Richard III,” 1911, and revised “Macbeth.”
THE HUNGRY SHEEP
BY WILLIAM LYON PHELPS
Lampson Professor of English Literature at Yale University
“The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed,
But swoln with wind and the rank mist they draw,
Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread.”
MILTON, “Lycidas.”
ONE of to-day’s favorite questions, both in private speculation and in public debate, is this, “Why do not more men go regularly to church?” Like all questions of real interest, it is much easier to ask than to answer. The pews undoubtedly contain more women than men, though this fact by itself need occasion no alarm. It does not prove that the church has “lost its hold” or that the habit of going to church is relatively unimportant. Women have always taken more interest in religious organizations than men, both because they have more leisure for contemplation, and because public worship appeals more to a woman’s nature than it does to a man’s. If the mere fact that the minister sees in front of him more brilliant hats than bald heads be a sign that the church does not appeal to the solid intelligence of humanity, then the symphony concert and the art museum fail even more signally. The masculine proportion of listeners at a high-class musical entertainment or among the visitors at an art gallery is even less than it is at church. Indeed, it is rather interesting to observe that at almost any public spectacle the number of men is in inverse ratio to the intellectual value of the performance. At a vaudeville the men vastly outnumber the women, and amid the enormous throng at a prize-fight there are hardly any women at all. Thus the fact that the seats at a prize-fight are crowded with men, while the pews are filled with women, does not in itself indicate that the church is on the down-grade.