Page:Moral Obligation to be Intelligent.djvu/96

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THE MIND OF SHAKESPERE

by dint of practice and the family fortune becomes an almost efficient, if uneconomic, hunter or sailor or farmer; or the latest descendant inherits grace of manner, the cumulative breeding of generations, but the exhausted stock bequeathes him nothing more, and he is at best a gentlemanly fool. This twofold degeneracy the student of society teaches us to observe,—and lo! Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Ague-cheek. Or, to illustrate again, the old French poets had a definite type of lyric called the chanson d'aubade, or dawn song—the complement of the serenade, or evening song. A famous example of this type, the French scholar tells the French student, is "Hark! Hark! the lark," from Cymbeline. One other type of dawn song, the chanson d'aube, expressed the sorrow of two lovers who must leave each other's arms at daybreak. Among the marks of

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