"Who might be your mother,
That you insult, exult, and all at once,
Over the wretched?"
Shakspeare was, if I am not mistaken, one of those persons to whom a mother was, as some one expresses it, "the holiest thing alive." He concentrates this sentiment in the words of Troilus (Troilus and Cressida, Act V. Sc. 2.):
"Let it not be believ'd for womanhood:
Think we had mothers."
And again, in those of Palamon (which I have no doubt are Shakspeare's) in the Two Noble Kinsmen, Act V. Sc. 1.:
"I have been harsh
To large confessors, and have hotly ask'd them
If they had mothers? I had one, a woman,