approves that opinion. His gentility, though a little rusted and obsolete, is like a Sunday suit which nobody thinks of rallying. He wears it well, and his mistress cannot afford to treat him exactly as a servant; in fact, she has occasionally dropped good-natured phrases which he has interpreted into a special partiality: for Quixotic conceits can riot about inside of his stiff demeanor. This proneness to fantasy increases the touchiness of a man of reserve. He can never take a joke, and his climate is too inclement to shelter humor. Souls must be at bloodheat, and brains must expand with it like a blossom, before humor will fructify. He wonders how Olivia can tolerate the clown. "I protest," he says, "I take these wise men, that crow so at these set kind of fools, to be no better than the fools' zanies." Olivia hits the difficulty when she replies, "Oh, you are sick of self-love, and taste with a distempered appetite." Perhaps he thinks nobly of the soul because he so profoundly respects his own, and carries it upon stilts over the heads of the servants and Sir Toby and Sir Andrew.

Imagine this saturnine and self-involved man obliged to consort daily with Sir Toby, who brings his hand to the buttery-bar before breakfast, and who hates going to bed "as an unfilled can," unless no more drink is forthcoming; an irascible fellow, too, and all the more tindery because continually dry. He has Sir Andrew Aguecheek for a boon companion, who says of himself that sometimes he has no more wit than a Christian, or than an ordinary man. When he is not in liquor he is fuddled with inanity, and chirps and skips about, deluding himself with the notion that Olivia will receive his addresses. Sir Toby, to borrow money of him, fosters the notion, and flatters his poor tricks. Then there is that picador of a clown, who plants in Malvolio's thin skin a perfect quickset of barbed quips, and sends him lowering around the mansion which these roisterers have turned into a tavern. The other servant, Fabian, has a grudge against him for interfering with a bear-baiting he was interested in; for

Malvolio was one of those Puritans who frowned upon that sport, as Macaulay said, not because it worried the bear, but because it amused the men. The steward was right when he informed this precious set that they were idle, shallow things, and he was not of their element. No doubt he is the best man of the lot. But he interrupts their carousing at midnight in such a sour and lofty way that we are entertained to hear their drunken chaffing, and we call to Maria for another stoup, though they have had too much already; but a fresh exposition of dryness always sets in when such a virtue as Malvolio's tries to wither us. However, he becomes the object of their animosity, and they work in his distemper to make him ridiculous.— WEISS, Wit, Humor, and Shakespeare.

SIR ANDREW

The reverse to this caricature [Malvolio] is the squire Sir Andrew. He is a melancholy picture of what man would be without any self-love, the source indeed of so many weaknesses. To this straight-haired country squire, life consists only in eating and drinking; eating beef, he himself fears, has done harm to his wit; in fact, he is stupid even to silliness, totally deprived of all passion, and thus of all self-love or self-conceit. He looks up to the awkward Sir Toby, as well as to the adroit fool, as paragons of urbane manners, and seeks to copy their phraseology; he is the parrot and the utterly thoughtless echo of Sir Toby; he thinks to have everything, to be and to have been all that Sir Toby was and had; he repeats his words and imitates him, without even understanding what he says. The dissolute Sir Toby has brought him forward as a suitor for Olivia, that he may fleece him; but the poor suitor himself believes not in his success, and is ever on the point of departing. He despairs of his manners, and the cold sweat stands on his brow if his business is only with the chamber-maid. He repeats indeed after Sir Toby that he too was adored once; but we see, whilst he

says it, by the stupid face, that on this point beyond any other he is totally without experience. He has never been so conceited as to believe himself seriously regarded by any; his mistrust of himself is as great as his mistrust of others is small. When Sir Toby seeks to persuade him and others that he is a linguist, a courtier, a musician, a dancer, and a fencer, the desire seizes him for a moment perhaps, after his corrupter has dragged him away to drink wine against his will, to look a little at himself; but close behind this paroxysm of feeble and trifling conceit there lurks ever a renouncing of self and a contempt of all his gifts. Scarcely can poverty of mind be more bluntly derided than when Sir Toby asks him reproachfully if this is "a world to hide virtues in!"-GERVINUS, Shakespeare Commentaries.

MARIA

Of all the subordinate persons in the Twelfth Night, no one character is more finely conceived and more thoroughly followed out, than that of Maria. She is by nature of the most boisterous spirits, irrepressible, outpouring. Her delight is teasing; her joy a hoax; her happiness a good practical jest. Worrying is her element, and she gambols in it, "dolphin-like"; tormenting is her beatitude on this earth, and she would scarcely desire a new earth, and to live in it, if debarred of her darling joke-inquisition, of which she is grand inquisitor, arch-judiciary, and executioner. She has no female companion, no associate of her own sex but her mistress, and she (the Countess) is a recluse, shutting herself out from society, musing over her brother's death. This circumstance naturally throws one of Maria's temperament into fellowship with the men of the household; and her conduct takes a color from that association. Her fun is all but masculine; and yet her gaiety is of the most inspiring kind, but still perfectly feminine; so impulsive, so breathlessly eager, so unmisgiving! No one escapes her; not one, even, of her hoax

fellows. She rates Sir Toby, and soundly, about his late hours; twitting him with his jollifications, and scoffing at his gull-companion, Sir Andrew Aguecheek. And when this last enters, she has a tilt at him, jeering, joking, mystifying, obfuscating him.

We next see her, head-over-ears, in a plaguing-bout with the Clown, whom she threatens with her lady's displeasure for some misdemeanor, of which she is curious to discover the secret. But Feste is the only one who is a match for her; and he brings her two Rolands for her Oliver. He has a secret of her own, and this gives him the whip-hand of her. But she is never content except when plying the teazle upon one hapless pate or other; and her talent is unmisgiving and untiring.-CLARKE, Shakespeare-Charac

ters.

LOVE

At the first glance it might seem as if in What You Will, the end in view was a comic exhibition of love, which of itself can as well form the substance of a comedy as the fundamental theme of a tragedy. However, we have here nothing to do with the real and, in this sense, the significant passion of love. Love here, appears rather as a mere freak of the imagination, a mere glittering kaleidoscope of sentiment, a gay dress in which the soul envelops itself and which it changes with the various seasons. The Duke's passion for Olivia bursts out into flame as suddenly for Viola, as her heart is kindled with love for him; Olivia's fondness for Viola is quite satisfied with the substitution of the brother, who, on his part, makes no objection about being put in his sister's place, and Malvolio's and Sir Andrew's affection for Olivia is a mere bubble. Nay, Antonio's very friendship for Sebastian is also somewhat accidental and fantastic in character. Thus the playful capriciousness of love appears only to be the main spring to the merry game of life which is here unrolled before our eyes; it is only a prominent motive for the de

velopment of the action, not the nucleus and gravitating point of the whole.-ULRICI, Shakespeare's Dramatic Art.

UNITY OF PERSONS AND PLACE

What Bassanio is for the organic unity of The Merchant of Venice, Olivia is for Twelfth Night. In neither of the two plots is she the chief character, but merely a very prominent one; to win her hand is the mainspring of one, whereby a chance is given to Viola to reveal her feminine advantages, as it is also of the other, which involves Malvolio's humiliation. How important she is to the establishment of the artistic whole will be noted if we were to put another character in her place as the aim of Malvolio's ambition. Should the aspirations of the steward extend beyond the house of his mistress, his discomforture elsewhere follows, and the artistic unity of the plot is lost as well as our own interest, and, in fact, we have enclosed two comedies in one frame. To guard against the impression that we have here a mere unity of persons, there is the unity of place; there are only six short scenes, secondary components of the composition, and one chief scene (Act II, sc. iv) which are not laid in Olivia's house. Through this arrangement not only do actors in both plots come in continuous touch with each other, but the plots themselves define each other and interlace.

Just as the haughty Olivia excites the aspirations of the narrow prosaic Malvolio, so Viola is brought down from romantic heights to common daily life by the episode of the duel, which also serves to reveal the pusillanimity of Sir Andrew. Malvolio's mad presumption was fostered by the favored position which his liberal unsuspicious mistress gave him near her person; and his hopes were nourished by the persistent rejection to which even such a brilliant wooer as the Duke had to submit. And never could Sir Toby have kindled in Sir Andrew's soul such murderous designs had not Viola been the messenger of love from a powerful rival. Sebastian, too, could not have won Olivia