44

degree (1, iii, 75). With right insight Richard Grant White and other critics have seen in this character a portrait of Shakespeare himself in his self-contained maturity, as Romeo represents himself in his passionate boyhood and Hamlet in his self-questioning and self-torturing youth, while Prospero we may imagine is a forecast of his old age. See ODYSSEUS in vol. II.

Shakespeare, acting upon a mere hint, filling up a mere traditionary outline, drew a man of mature years, of wide observation, of profoundest cogitative power, one who knew all the weakness and all the wiles of human nature, and who yet remained with a man who saw through all shams, and

blood unbittered and with soul unsoured

fathomed all motives, and who yet was not scornful of his kind, not misanthropic, hardly cynical except in passing moods; and what other man was this than Shakespeare himself? What had he to do when he had passed forty years but to utter his own thoughts when he would find words for the lips of Ulysses?-R. G. WHITE, article On Reading Shakespeare, in Galaxy, February, 1877.

Uncas

cally, Una represents Queen Elizabeth, and Duessa a combination of Mary Tudor and Mary Stuart (see DUESSA). She is the heroine of Canto 1. Riding on a white horse and leading a white lamb she appears at the Court of Gloriana praying for a champion who will slay a dragon that holds her parents prisoners. The task is confided to the Red Cross Knight, but Una and he are separated through the wiles of Archimago. She sets out alone, is befriended by a lion who becomes her constant attendant, and finally rejoins the Red Cross Knight. His task accomplished, he is badly wounded. She nurses him back to health and is joined to him in Eden. Two shall be named pre-eminently dear:The gentle Lady married to the Moor, And heavenly Una with her milk-white Lamb.

WORDSWORTH: Personal Talk.

Una is one of the noblest contributions which poetry, whether of ancient or of modern times, has made to its great picturegallery of characters.-AUBREY DE VERE:

Essays, Chiefly on Poetry, 1887.

me.

Neither fondness for my son, nor reverence for my aged sire, nor the due love which ought to have gladdened Penelope, could conquer in me the ardor which I had to become experienced in the world, and in human vice and worth. I put out into the deep open sea with but one ship, and with that small company which had not deserted I and my companions were old and tardy when we came to that narrow pass where Hercules assigned his landmarks. "O brothers," I said, "who through a hundred thousand dangers have reached the West, deny not to this the brief vigil of your senses that remain, experience of the unpeopled world beyond the sun. Consider your origin, ye were not formed to live like brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge."

Night already saw the other pole with all its stars, and ours so low that it rose not from the ocean floor.

Una, in Spenser's Faërie Queene, the type of unity and purity of faith, as Duessa is of duplicity and impurity. Hence Una means Protestantism and Duessa "Papacy," or, more specifi

We accept with acquiescence, nay, with admiration, such characters as Magua, Chingachgook, Susquesus, Tamenund, and Canonchet; but when we come to Uncas, in The Last of the Mohicans, we pause and shake our heads with incredulous doubt. That a young Indian chief should fall in love with a handsome quadroon like Cora Munro for she was neither more nor less than that-is natural enough; but that he should manifest his passion with such delicacy and refinement is impossible. We include under one and the same name all the affinities and attractions of sex, but the appetite of the savage differs from the love of the educated and civilized man as much as charcoal differs from the diamond. The sentiment of love, as distinguished from the passion, is one of the last and best results of Christianity and civilization: in no one thing does savage life differ from civilized more than in the relations between man and woman, and in the affections that unite Uncas is a graceful and beautiful but he is no Indian.-Atlantic

them.
Monthly, January, 1862.

image;

Indians-nay, rather too much of themsince the days when Fenimore Cooper, with

Have we not had enough of these red

his pleasant dream of the Last of the Mohicans, deluded our young fancies into believing that the conquering white race had destroyed a transatlantic Arcadia in which the quiet enjoyment of Theocritus's

shepherds was combined with the valor of Homer's heroes.-Saturday Review, November 10, 1855.

Undine, heroine of a fairy romance of that name (1807), by De la Motte Fouqué, a water nymph substituted as a changeling for a human infant and brought up by the unsuspecting family. Her putative father is a fisherman living on a peninsula near an enchanted forest. Here she is wooed by Sir Hulbrand. By her marriage she received a soul. When subsequently the knight fell in love with Bertalda, a mortal maiden (who turns out to be the fisherman's real daughter), Undine was snatched away from him by her kinsfolk under the sea. Hulbrand marries Bertalda. On the wedding day she calls for a drink from the well which Undine had covered over to save Hulbrand from the wrath of the water nymphs. Then Undine herself is forced to rise with the upheaving waters, glide into Hulbrand's chamber and kiss him to death. Around his grave there bub

Valentine, in Shakespeare's Two Gentlemen of Verona (1595), one of the titular gentlemen, the other being Protheus. Valentine wooed and married Silvia, daughter of the Duke of Milan, despite the rivalry of Thurio, and Protheus married Julia. Valentine, in Congreve's Love for Love. See LEGEND, VALENTINE.

Valentine, in Goethe's Faust (1798), the brother of Margaret. Maddened at her seduction by Faust, he attacks the latter during a serenade and is slain by Mephistopheles.

Valerius, titular hero of a novel (1821), by J. G. Lockhart. The son of a Roman commander in Britain, he is summoned to Rome after his father's death to take possession of the estates to which he has succeeded. He meets a Christian maiden, Athanasia, who converts him and returns

Valjean

Usher, Roderick, hero of a short story, The Fall of the House of Usher, by E. A. Poe, included in volume Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840). Roderick and his twin sister, the lady Madeline, were the last scions of an ill-fated family. He himself is a prey to melancholy and morbid fears. His sister dies, apparently, and is buried. He soon realizes that she has been buried alive, but has no strength to go to her assistance, and betrays only a horrified acquiescence when the enshrouded figure of the lady Madeline, bleeding from her efforts at self-release, appears at the door of his room. "For a moment she remained trembling and reeling to and fro upon the threshold-then with a low moaning cry, fell heavily inward upon the person of her brother, and in her violent and now final death agonies, bore him to the floor a corpse, and a victim to the terrors he had anticipated.

with him to Britain as his bride. The time is laid in the reign of Emperor Trojan and the persecution of the Christians forms a part of the historic background.

Valjean, Jean, in Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, Part 1 (1862), a convict who goes through a complete moral renovation. First we have the gradual declension of the innocent son of toil into the depraved and hardened outcast. The saintly charity of Bishop Myriel stirs his deadened conscience and awakens him to the first sense of shame. Nevertheless, the force of habit is still strong. The conversion is premature. Jean cannot resist the temptation of making off with the episcopal plate. When captured and brought back, he is released by the bishop, who quietly observes that he had forgotten the candlesticks. The

convict is deeply moved. Not, however, until his evil nature has made one expiring effort in robbing a poor little Savoyard of a five-franc piece do Monseigneur's words and conduct bear their full fruit. The piteous grief of the child shocks the man into full recognition of his wickedness and degradation. The crisis is over and he is reclaimed to virtue. He becomes a wealthy manufacturer, known to the world as M. Madeleine, Mayor of N. sur N., and, best of all, the Elisha upon whom falls the mantle of Monseigneur Myriel when that good man is gathered to his fathers. Justice ferrets him out in his disguise, and once more he becomes an outlaw but not an outcast.

"

Valley of the Shadow of Death, in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, Part I, (1678), the valley through which Christian had to pass after his triumph over Apollyon in the Valley of Humiliation. It is described in the language of Jeremiah ii, 6, as a "wilderness, a land of deserts and of pits, a land of drouth and of the shadow of death, a land that no man passeth through, and where no man dwelt." Bunyan adds that the valley was as dark as pitch; that to the right was a deep ditch, to the left a quagmire: that it ran past the very mouth of hell, and that it was infested by hobgoblins, satyrs and dragons.

Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil:

for Thou art with me; Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me.-Psalms xxiii, 4.

Van Bibber, the central figure in a volume of short stories, Van Bibber and Others (1890), by Richard Harding Davis. A young New York clubman, moving by birthright among the so-called Four Hundred, he yet has a fondness for bohemian adventures.

Vane, Graham, in Bulwer-Lytton's novel, The Parisians, a typical young Englishman, evidently modelled after the author himself in early manhood, who stands serene amid the restless whirl around him,-in dramatic contrast with the priests, atheists, legitimists, Orleanists, millionaire finan

Vanessa

ciers of the Chaussée d'Antin, and the fierce Socialists of Belleville.

Vane, Lady Isabel, heroine of the novel, East Lynne (1861), by Mrs. Henry Wood, and of its numerous dramatizations by John Oxenford, J. C. Chute, T. A. Palmer, and others, which have brought fame and fortune to English and American actresses taking the part of Lady Isabel. East Lynne is the name of the ancestral home which Isabel's bankrupt father is compelled to sell just before his death. It is purchased by Archibald Carlyle, who marries the heroine. A rejected suitor, Francis Leveson, foully slanders Carlyle. Isabel, believing he is untrue to her, elopes with Leveson; but, soon repenting, returns, disguised and unrecognized, to her own home, as governess to her own children and to those of Carlyle's second marriage, for he has believed her dead. In the end Carlyle's character is vindicated, Leveson is shown to be a scoundrel, and Isabel dies forgiving and forgiven.

Vanessa, a poetical name given by Dean Swift to Esther Vanhomrigh (1690-1723), a young woman, twentyfive years his junior, who had fallen in love with him and had gone so far as to propose marriage. How Swift received the declaration is told in his poem Cadenus and Vanessa. Cadenus is an obvious anagram of Decanus, Latin for Dean. Vanessa is more cunningly compounded of Van, the first syllable of Vanhomrigh, and Essa, diminutive of Esther. See STELLA.

As

The loves of Cadenus and Vanessa you may peruse in Cadenus's own poem on the subject, and in poor Vanessa's vehement expostulatory verses and letters to him; she adores him, implores him, admires him, thinks him something god-like, and only prays to be admitted to lie at his feet. they are bringing him home from church, those divine feet of Dr. Swift's are found pretty often in Vanessa's parlor. He likes to be admired and adored. He finds Miss Vanhomrigh to be a woman of great taste and spirit, and beauty and wit, and a fortune too. He sees her every day; he does not tell Stella about the business: until the impetuous Vanessa becomes too fond of him, until the doctor is quite frightened

by the young woman's ardour and confounded by her warmth. He wanted to

marry neither of them-that I believe was the truth; but if he had not married Stella, Vanessa would have had him in spite of himself. When he went back to Ireland, his Ariadne, not content to remain in her isle, pursued the fugitive dean. In vain he protested, he vowed, he soothed, and bullied; the news of the dean's marriage with Stella at last came to her, and it killed her-she died of that passion.-THACKERAY: English Humorists.

64

Vanity Fair, in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, Part I, a fair so called because it is held in a town that "is lighter than vanity, and also because all that is there sold or that cometh thither is vanity." Bunyan makes an explanatory reference to Psalm lxii, 9, where men of high and low degree are spoken of as “lighter than vanity." He explains that almost 5000 years ago Beelzebub, Apollyon, and Legion, noting that the path to the Celestial City ran through this spot, contrived here to set up a fair. All such merchandise are sold as houses, lands, trades, places, honors, preferments, titles, countries, kingdoms, lusts, pleasures, and delights of all sorts, as harlots, wives, husbands, children, lives, blood, bodies, souls, silver, gold, pearls, precious stones, and what not." Christian and Faithful, when they reached the city, denounced the fair and told the people there were things in the world of more consequence than money and pleasure. In their turn they were denounced as Bedlamites, were arrested, beaten, and put into a cage. Next day they were taken before Justice Hategood, and Faithful was condemned to be burned at the stake.

Varden

relief of Pisa on one preposterous condition, that Monna Vanna, clad only in a mantle, should spend the night in his tent. Vanna, determined to save the city at any cost, forces her husband's consent. Prinzivalle loves her too dearly to harm her. He goes back with her to Pisa. Guido cannot believe in the innocence of the pair. He assumes that Vanna has delivered the enemy into his hands and praises her above Lucrece and Judith as a self-immolated heroine. Prinzivalle he condemns to death by torture. Vanna, fully awake now to the difference between the two men, saves Prinzivalle and flees with him.

Varden, Dolly, in Dickens's novel, Barnaby Rudge (1841), daughter of Gabriel Varden, locksmith. She was winsome and coquettish, playing fast and loose with the hearts of three admirers, Joe Willett, Hugh of the Maypole Inn, and Simon Tappertit. She dressed in the Watteau style. In 1875-76 a Dolly Varden was the popular name for a vari-colored shirtwaist, and hat imitated from Watteau.

In any just sense there is no heroine in Barnaby Rudge, which is a book of more skill and power than any that Dickens had reproach such a lady-like lay-figure as yet written. We may dismiss without selfEmma Haredale, and a goblin effigy like Miss Miggs, and come without delay to Dolly Varden, who, in turn, need hardly delay us longer. She is a cheap little coquette imagined upon the commonest lines, with abundant assertion as to her good looks and graces, but without evidence of the charm that the silliest flirt has in reality. She is nothing and she does nothing; and she cannot be petted and patted by her inventor, with all his fondness, into any semblance of personality.-W. D. HOWELLS:

Varden, Mrs. Martha, in Dickens's novel, Barnaby Rudge, the wife of Gabriel, a lady of uncertain temper, which, being interpreted, signifies a temper tolerably certain to make everybody more or less uncomfortable.

When other people were merry Mrs. Varden was dull, and when other people were dull Mrs. Varden was disposed to be amazingly cheerful."