As we look at the device we are sensible to a singular incongruity between the subject and the droll, Punch-like figures, which make up the border. The sentiment, too, is as incongruous, that “Pride is a woman’s vice and argues hardness of look and of feeling such as there is in stone.”

Making a slight change in the motto, Whitney (p. 13) writes. Superbiæ vltio,—“Vengeance upon pride,”—

Shakespeare’s notices of Niobe are little more than allusions; the mode in which Apollo and Diana executed the cruel vengeance may be glanced at in All’s Well (act v. sc. 3, l. 5, vol. iii. p. 201), when the Countess of Rousillon pleads for her son to the King of France,—

Troilus (act v. sc. 10, l. 16, vol. vi. p. 261), anticipating Priam’s and Hecuba’s mighty grief over the slain Hector, speaks thus of the fact,—

Hamlet, too (act i. sc. 2, l. 147, vol. viii. p. 17), in his bitter expressions respecting his mother’s marriage, speaks thus severely of the brevity of her widowhood,—

Tiresias, the blind soothsayer of Thebes, had foretold that the comely Narcissus would live as long as he could refrain from the sight of his own countenance,—

“But he, ignorant of his destiny,” says Claude Mignault, “grew so desperately in love with his own image seen in a fountain, that he miserably wasted away, and was changed into the flower of his own name, which is called Narce, and means drowsiness or infatuation, because the smell of the Narcissus affects the head.”

However that may be, Alciatus, edition Antwerp, 1581, exhibits the youth surveying his features in a running stream; the flower is behind him, and in the distance is Tiresias pronouncing his doom. “Self love” is the motto.

Anulus also, in the “Picta Poesis” (p. 48), mentions his foolish and vain passion,—

From Alciat and Anulus, Whitney takes up the fable (p. 149), his printer Rapheleng using the same wood-block as Plantyn did in 1581. Of the three stanzas we subjoin one,—

It is only in one instance, Antony and Cleopatra (act ii. sc. 5, l. 95, vol. ix. p. 48), and very briefly, that Shakespeare names Narcissus; he does this when the Messenger repeats to Cleopatra that Antony is married, and she replies,—

The most beautiful of the maidens of Thessaly, Daphne, the daughter of the river-god Peneus, was Apollo’s earliest love. He sought her in marriage, and being refused by her, prepared to force consent. The maiden fled, and was pursued, and, at the very moment of her need invoked her father’s aid, and was transformed into a laurel.

Shakespeare recognises neither Bellerophon nor the Chimæra, but Pegasus, the wonderful creature, and Perseus its owner.

The dauphin Lewis (see p. 141) likens his own horse to Pegasus, “with nostrils of fire,”—

It is a beast for Perseus: he is pure air and fire ... he is indeed a horse.

In the Grecian camp (see Troilus and Cressida, act i. sc. 3, l. 33, vol. vi. p. 142), Nestor is urging the worth of dauntless valour, and uses the apt comparison,—

The last lines are descriptive of Alciat’s device, on p. 299.

It is the same Nestor (act iv. sc. 5, l. 183), who so freely and generously compliments Hector, though his enemy,—

Young Harry’s praise, too, in 1 Henry IV., act iv. sc. 1. l. 109, vol. iv. p. 318, is thus celebrated by Vernon,—

For nearly all the personages and the tales contained in this section, authority may be found in Ovid, and in the various pictorially illustrated editions of the Metamorphoses or of portions of them, which were numerous during the actively literary life of Shakespeare. It is, I confess, very questionable, whether for his classically mythic tales he was indeed indebted to the Emblematists; yet the many parallels in mythology between him and them justify the pleasant labour of setting both side by side, and, by this means, of facilitating to the reader the forming for himself an independent judgment.

SIMILITUDES and, in cases not a few, identities have often been detected between the popular tales of widely distant nations, intimating either a common origin, or a common inventive power to work out like results. Fables have ever been a floating literature,—borne hither and thither on the current of Time,—used by any one, and properly belonging to no one. How they have circulated from land to land, and from age to age, we cannot tell; whence they first arose it is impossible to divine. There exist, we are told, fables collected by Bidpai in Sanscrit, by Lokman in Arabic, by Æsop in Greek, and by Phædrus in Latin; and they seem to have been interchanged and borrowed one from the other as if they were the property of the world,—handed down from the ancestorial times of a remote antiquity.

Shakespeare’s general estimation of fables, and of those of Æsop in particular, may be gathered from certain expressions in two of the plays,—in the Midsummer Night’s Dream (act v. sc. 1, l. 1, vol. ii. p. 258) and in 3 Henry VI. (act v. sc. 5, l. 25, vol. v. p. 329). In the former the speakers are Hippolyta and Theseus,—

In the latter Queen Margaret’s son in reproof of Gloucester, declares,—

The year of Shakespeare’s birth, 1564, saw the publication, at Rome, of the Latin Fables of Gabriel Faerni; they had been written at the request of Pope Pius IV., and possess a high degree of excellence, both for their correct Latinity and for the power of invention which they display. Roscoe, in his Life of Leo X. (Bohn’s ed. ii. p. 172), even avers that they “are written with such classical purity, as to have given rise to an opinion that he had discovered and fraudulently availed himself of some of the unpublished works of Phædrus.” This opinion, however, is without any foundation.

Reusner’s lines, which have considerable beauty, may thus be rendered,—

The device itself, in these three authors, is a representation of Hares biting a dead Lion; and in this we find an origin for the words used in King John (act ii. sc. 1, l. 134, vol. iv. p. 17), to reprove the Archduke of Austria. Austria demands of Philip Faulconbridge, “What the devil art thou?” and Philip replies,—

Immediately references follow to other fables, or to their pictorial representations,—

in allusion to the fable of the fox or the ass hunting in a lion’s skin. Again (l. 141),—

a sentiment evidently suggested to the poet’s mind by some device or emblem in which the incongruity had found a place. Farther research might clear up this and other unexplained allusions in Shakespeare to fables or proverbs; but there is no necessity for attempting this in every instance that occurs.

The consociation in life is not forgotten; and though the supporting tree should die, the twining plant still grasps it round and adorns it with leaves and fruit.

To which lines Whitney (p. 62) gives for interpretation the two stanzas,—

The Emblems of Joachim Camerarius,—Ex Re Herbaria (edition 1590, p. 36),—have a similar device and motto,—

And in the Emblems of Otho Vænius (Antwerp, 1608, p. 244), four lines of Alciat being quoted, there are both English and Italian versions, to—

And,—

It is in the Comedy of Errors (act ii. sc. 2, l. 167, vol. i. p. 417) that Shakespeare refers to this fable, when Adriana addresses Antipholus of Syracuse,—

With a change from the vine to the ivy a very similar comparison occurs in the Midsummer Night’s Dream (act iv. sc. 1, l. 37, vol. ii. p. 250). The infatuated Titania addresses Bottom the weaver as her dearest joy,—

The fable of the Fox and the Grapes is admirably represented in Freitag’s Mythologia Ethica (p. 127), to the motto, “Feigned is the refusal of that which cannot be had,”—

The fable itself belongs to an earlier work by Gabriel Faerni, and there exemplifies the thought, “to glut oneself with one’s own folly,”—