142
NOTES AND QUERIES. [ii s. ix. FEB. 21, 1914.
And so forth. Perhaps Lady Capulet may
have looked upon it as being her duty to
keep up the family quarrel now that her
lord showed the tolerance which is apt to
come with years ; and perhaps, as " An
Actress " suggests, her bitterness was inten-
sified by the fact that the rival house had
its heir in Romeo, while their own direct
descent must merge in Juliet. It is she
alone who clamours for Romeo's death for
killing one who had slain Mercutio, and we
find her planning to have poison administered
to the young object of her hate,
That he shall soon keep Tybalt company.
As a mother Lady Capulet was ambitious and unscrupulous ; she was stern and unsym- pathetic ; quite other than the " Mummy " of the present day, who lovingly sub- mits to the guidance of her child, and is easily " got over." But surely for a fif- teenth- or sixteenth -century parent Lady Capulet was not exceptionally hard ; she was only like the rest. Let us remind ourselves of what little Lady Jane Grey, well-nigh Juliet's contemporary, revealed to Roger Ascham when he found her reading Greek, instead of hunting with her people in Brad- gate Park, and asked her the reason of her preference.
" I will tell you, quoth she, and tell you a troth which perchance ye will marvel, at. One of the greatest benefits that ever God gave me is that He sent me to sharpe and severe Parentes and so gentle a scholemaster. For when I am in presence of either father or mother, whether I speake, kepe silence, sit, stand, cr go, eate, drinke, be merie, or sad, be sowyng, playing, dauncing or doing anie thing els, I must do it as it were, in such weight, mesure and number, even so perfitlie, as God made the world, or else I am so sharplie taunted, so cruellie threatened, yea presentlie some tymes, with
? inches, nippes and bobbes and other waies which will not name, for the honor I beare them, so without mesure misordered, that I think my selfe in hell till tyme cum that I must go to M. Elmer, who teacheth me so gentlie, with soch faire allure- mentes to learning, that I thinke all the tyme nothing, whiles I am with him. And when I am called from him I fall on weeping because what- soever I do els but learning is ml of grief, trouble, feare and whole misliking unto me."
Poor little Jane ! and she was great-niece of that mighty monarch Henry VIII. ! I do not think her mother was kinder or more approachable than Lady Capulet herself, and the two fathers were not out of keeping. I am convinced that the epithets which Juliet's hurled at her were familiar to her from his mouth as household words, and not the unparalleled result of a moment of extraordinary excitement.
It is hardly necessary to say that there was nothing exceptionally arbitrary in the
mode in which a marriage was " arranged ' r
between Juliet and the County Paris
Lady Jane Grey again, for instance, was
given, against her will, to Lord Guildford
Dudley before she had turned sixteen. For
ages and ages, as Mr. Gairdner says of the
fourteenth century in one of his introduc-
tions to 'The Paston Letters' (iii. Ixiv.),
" marriage was quite understood to be a
thing which depended entirely upon arrange-
ments made by parents." So it must be
admitted that the Capulets merely observed
" the rigour of the game " when they played
Juliet to take County Paris. Their conduct
was at least as conventionally justifiable as
that of their daughter, who contracted her-
self in a brace of shakes to a youth whom
she had barely seen, reminding one of the
girl of whom Biondello told : " married in
an afternoon, as she went in the garden for
parsley to stuff a rabbit " (' Shrew,' IV. iv.)^
ST. S WITHIN.
BISHOP MAURICE OF OSSORY ANI>
HUDSON, THE PORTRAIT PAINTER.
I SEND (with permission of the possessor of the original MS., Miss C. C. Ogle, of Budleigh Salterton) a copy of a very interesting letter from Edward Maurice,, who was consecrated Bishop of Ossory in 1754, and died in 1756. The letter, which is only signed with the initials E. M., was probably written about 1749-50, but the year-date is partly obliterated, and a strangely wrong endorsement was consequently made about a hundred years ago that it was a letter of the Bishop of Ossory in 1709, A copy of the engraved portrait 'is in the Hope Col- lection of portraits at Oxford, and the senior Assistant Keeper, Mr. R. W. Bridgewater, has kindly furnished me with the following description. It is a three-quarters mezzotint (without name), standing, towards the right, but facing to front, wig, coat buttoned, right hand hanging down, left with hat, gloves and cane, the corner of a building to the left, and a hill in distance to the right r under, " Thomas Hudson Pinxt. J. McArdell Fecit." The engraver died in 1765. The quotation from Virgil (in the second form as given in the letter) is underneath. Mr. Bridgewater adds a reference to J. C. Smith's ' British Mezzotinto Portraits ' for identifica- tion.
Bishop Mant gives a notice of Maurice in vol. ii. of his ' History of the Church in Ireland,' with extracts from his blank-verse translation of Homer, of which the MS. is
