Shall I admit for a moment that our American young folks have less grace and sensibility than the French girls, and the Oxford youths who pleased Elizabeth?  Your face now, Fastidiosus, wears a frown like that of Rhadamanthus; but I remember our Hasty-Pudding days, when you played the part of a queen, and behaved in your disguise like Thor, in the old saga, when he went to Riesenheim in the garb of Freya, and honest giants, like Thrym, were frightened back the whole width of the hall.  Well, I do not censure it, and I do not believe you recall it with a sigh; and the reminiscence emboldens me to ask you whether it would not be still better if our dear Harvard, say (the steam of the pudding infects me through twenty years), among the many new wrinkles she in her old age so appropriately contracts, should devote an evening of Commencement-time to a performance, by the students, under the sanction and direction of professors, of some fine old masterpiece?

At our little Sweetbrier we have young men and young women together, as at Oberlin, Antioch, and Massachusetts normal schools.  I have no doubt our Hermione, when we gave the Winter’s Tale, had all the charm of Mademoiselle de Veillanne, who played Esther at St. Cyr.  I have no doubt our Portia, in the Merchant of Venice, in the trial scene, her fine stature and figure robed in the doctor’s long silk gown, which fell to her feet, and her abundant hair gathered out of sight into an ample velvet cap, so that she looked like a most wise and fair young judge, recited

  “The quality of mercy is not strained,”

in a voice as thrilling as that in which Mademoiselle de Glapion gave the part of Mordecai.  I am sure Queen Elizabeth would think our young cavaliers, well-knit and brown from the baseball-field, “right martial knights, having swart and manly countenances.”  If she could have seen our Antoninus, when we gave the act from Massinger’s most sweet and tender tragedy of the Virgin Martyr, or the noble Caesar, in our selections from Beaumont and Fletcher’s False One, she would have been as ready with the guineas as she was in the case of the son of the dean of Christ Church.

Our play at the last Commencement was Much Ado about Nothing.  It was selected six months before, and studied with the material in mind, the students in the literature class, available for the different parts.  What is there, thought I, in Beatrice—­sprightliness covering intense womanly feeling—­that our vivacious, healthful Ruth Brown cannot master; and what in Benedick, her masculine counterpart, beyond the power of Moore to conceive and render?  It is chiefly girlish beauty and simple sweetness that Hero requires, so she shall be Edith Grey.  Claudio, Leonato, Don John, Pedro,—­we have clean-limbed, presentable fellows that will look and speak them all well; and as for lumbering Dogberry, Abbot, with his fine sense of the ludicrous, will carry it out in the best manner.  A dash of the pencil here and there through the lines where Shakespeare was suiting his own time, and not the world as it was to be after three hundred refining years, and the marking out of a few scenes that could be spared from the action, and the play was ready; trimmed a little, but with not a whit taken from its sparkle or pathos, and all its lovelier poetry untouched.