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I conclude that the pistol, which gave my face such a look of triumph, was my brier, which I found in the morning beneath my pillow. The strangest thing of all, perhaps, is that when I awoke there was a smell of tobacco-smoke in the bedroom. Those who do not know the Arcadia may have a mixture that their uneducated palate loves, but they are always ready to try other mixtures.
'It says much, Margaret, returned lord Herbert, who had been listening intently; 'it tells me to love you for ever.-What poet is he who wrote the song, mistress Dorothy? He is not of our day-that I can tell but too plainly. It is a good song, and saith much. 'I found it near the end of the book called "The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia," replied Dorothy. 'And I knew it not!
"It is very lovely!" she said, more to herself than to any of her companions; "The world must have looked something like this in the first days of creation, so unspoilt and fresh and simple!" The Countess Amabil, walking with Sir Walter Langton, glanced coquettishly at her cavalier and smiled. "It is idyllic!" she said; "A sort of Arcadia without Corydon or Phyllis!
The fashion however passed away, but the "Arcadia" of Sir Philip Sidney shows the wonderful advance which prose had made under its influence. Sidney, the nephew of Lord Leicester, was the idol of his time, and perhaps no figure reflects the age more fully and more beautifully.
But whether or not he had heard of the literary greatness of Sir Philip before his death, the "Arcadia," which was first published four years after his death , and which in eight years had reached the third edition with another still in Scotland the following year must have been full of interest to Shakspere.
There, if anywhere, one would have expected to find Arcadia among fertility, loveliness, industry, and wealth. But, alas for the sad reality! the cool breath of those glittering water-meadows too often floats laden with poisonous miasma. Those picturesque villages are generally the perennial hotbeds of fever and ague, of squalid penury, sottish profligacy, dull discontent too stale for words.
Richard the conqueror, third brother, came after William the conquered. The other four acts of that play hang limply from that first. Of all his kings Richard is the only king unshielded by Shakespeare's reverence, the angel of the world. Why is the underplot of King Lear in which Edmund figures lifted out of Sidney's Arcadia and spatchcocked on to a Celtic legend older than history?
Even that, however, defeated his object, for it flattered him so much that he smiled with gratification. Gilray made one great sacrifice by giving up smoking, though not indeed such a sacrifice as mine, for up to this time he did not know the Arcadia Mixture.
He calls it also the "Star of Aready," because Callisto's boy was named Arcas, and they lived in Arcadia. In Milton's Comus, the elder brother, benighted in the woods, says, "Some gentle taper! Through a rush candle, from the wicker hole Of some clay habitation, visit us With thy long levelled rule of streaming light, And thou shalt be our star of Aready, Or Tyrian Chynsure."
Our road, which had been approaching the Sound, now skirted the head of a deep, irregular inlet, beyond which extended a beautiful promontory, thickly studded with cedars, and with scattering groups of elm, oak, and maple trees. Towards the end of the promontory stood a house, with white walls shining against the blue line of the Sound. "'There is Arcadia, at last! exclaimed Mr. Shelldrake.
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