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In the great street pageants, it was the beauty and winsomeness of the London ladies, looking on, that nearly drove the foreigners wild. In 1606, upon the entry of the king of Denmark, the chronicler celebrates “the unimaginable number of gallant ladies, beauteous virgins, and other delicate dames, filling the windows of every house with kind aspect.” And in 1638, when Cheapside was all alive with the pageant of the entry of the queen mother, “this miserable old queen,” as Lilly calls Marie de’ Medicis (Mr. Furnivall reproduces an old cut of the scene), M. de la Serre does not try to restrain his admiration for the pretty women on view: only the most fecund imagination can represent the content one has in admiring the infinite number of beautiful women, each different from the other, and each distinguished by some sweetness or grace to ravish the heart and take captive one’s liberty. No sooner has he determined to yield to one than a new object of admiration makes him repent the precipitation of his judgment.

And all the other foreigners were in the like case of “goneness.” Kiechel, writing in 1585, says, “Item, the women there are charming, and by nature so mighty pretty as I have scarcely ever beheld, for they do not falsify, paint, or bedaub themselves as in Italy or other places;” yet he confesses (and here is another tradition preserved) “they are somewhat awkward in their style of dress.” His second “item” of gratitude is a Netherland custom that pleased him–whenever a foreigner or an inhabitant went to a citizen’s house on business, or as a guest, he was received by the master, the lady, or the daughter, and “welcomed” (as it is termed in their language); “he has a right to take them by the arm and to kiss them, which is the custom of the country; and if any one does not do so, it is regarded and imputed as ignorance and ill-breeding on his part.” Even the grave Erasmus, when he visited England, fell easily into this pretty practice, and wrote with untheological fervor of the “girls with angel faces,” who were “so kind and obliging.” “Wherever you come,” he says, “you are received with a kiss by all; when you take your leave you are dismissed with kisses; you return, kisses are repeated. They come to visit you, kisses again; they leave you, you kiss them all round. Should they meet you anywhere, kisses in abundance in fine, wherever you move there is nothing but kisses”–a custom, says this reformer, who has not the fear of Stubbes before his eyes, “never to be sufficiently commended.”

We shall find no more convenient opportunity to end this part of the social study of the age of Shakespeare than with this naive picture of the sex which most adorned it. Some of the details appear trivial; but grave history which concerns itself only with the actions of conspicuous persons, with the manoeuvres of armies, the schemes of politics, the battles of theologies, fails signally to give us the real life of the people by which we judge the character of an age.

III

When we turn from France to England in, the latter part of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century, we are in another atmosphere; we encounter a literature that smacks of the soil, that is as varied, as racy, often as rude, as human life itself, and which cannot be adequately appreciated except by a study of the popular mind and the history of the time which produced it.

“Voltaire,” says M. Guizot, “was the first person in France who spoke of Shakespeare’s genius; and although he spoke of him merely as a barbarian genius, the French public were of the opinion that he had said too much in his favor. Indeed, they thought it nothing less than profanation to apply the words genius and glory to dramas which they considered as crude as they were coarse.”