effect. The neutral title of Twelfth Night-conveying as it does a notion of genial mirth-might warrant us in thinking that there was a preponderance of the comic spirit. Charles I. appears to have thought so, when, in his copy of the second edition of Shakspere, he altered the title with his own pen to that of Malrolio.* But Malvolio is not the predominant idea of the comedy; nor is he of that exclusive interest that the whole action, even of the merely comic portions, should turn upon him. When Shakspere means one character to be the centre of the dramatic idea, he for the most part tells us so in his title:Hamlet, Othello, Lear, Macbeth, Timon. Not one of the comedies has such a personal title, for the evident reason that the effect in them must mainly depend upon the harmony of all the parts, rather than upon the absorbing passion of the principal character. The Twelfth Night is especially of this description. It presents us with the golden and the silver sides of human life,-the romantic and the humorous. But the two precious metals are moulded into one statue. It is scarcely necessary for us to enter into any analysis of the plot of this charming comedy, or attempt any dissection of its characters, for the purpose of opening to the reader new sources of enjoyment. It is impossible, we think, for one of ordinary sensibility to read through the first act without yielding himself up to the genial temper in which the entire play is written. "The sunshine of the breast" spreads its rich purple light over the whole champain, and penetrates into every thicket and every dingle. From the first line to the last-from the Duke's to the Clown's "That strain again ;—it had a dying fall," "With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,"― there is not a thought, or a situation, that is not calculated to call forth pleasurable feelings. The love-melancholy of the Duke is a luxurious abandonment to one pervading impression-not a fierce and hopeless contest with one o'ermastering passion. It delights to lie "canopied with bowers,"-to listen to "old and antique" songs, which dally with its "innocence,"-to be "full of shapes," and "high fantastical." The love of Viola is the sweetest and tenderest emotion that ever informed the heart of the purest and most graceful of beings with a spirit almost divine. Perhaps in the whole range of Shakspere's poetry there is nothing which comes more unbidden into the mind, and always in connexion with some image of the ethereal beauty of the utterer, than Viola's "she never told her love." The love of Olivia, wilful as it is, is not in the slightest degree repulsive. With the old stories before him, nothing but the refined delicacy of Shakspere's conception of the female character could have redeemed Olivia from approaching to the anti-feminine. But as it is we pity her, and we rejoice with her. These are what may be called the serious characters, because they are the vehicles for what we emphatically call the poetry of the play. But the comic characters are to us equally poetical—that is, they appear to us not mere copies of the representatives of temporary or individual follies, but embodyings of the universal comic, as true and as fresh to-day as they were two centuries and a half ago. Malvolio is to our minds as poetical as Don Quixote; and we are by no means sure that Shakspere meant the poor cross-gartered Steward only to be laughed at, any more than Cervantes did the knight of the rueful countenance. He meant us to pity him, as Olivia and the Duke pitied him; for, in truth, the delusion by which Malvolio was wrecked, only passed out of the romantic into the comic through the manifestation of the vanity of the character in reference to his situation. But if we laugh at Malvolio we are not to laugh illnaturedly, for the poet has conducted all the mischief against him in a spirit in which there is no real malice at the bottom of the fun. Sir Toby is a most genuine character,- -one given to strong potations and boisterous merriment; but with a humour about him perfectly irresistible. His abandon to the instant opportunity of laughing at and with others is something so thoroughly English, that we are not surprised the poet gave him an English name. And like all genuine humorists Sir Toby must have his butt. What a trio is presented in that glorious scene of the second act, where the two Knights and the Clown "make the welkin dance;”—the humorist, the fool, and the philosopher!-for Sir Andrew is the fool, and the Clown is the philosopher. We hold the Clown's epilogue song to be the most philosophical Clown's song upon record; and a *This copy, which formerly belonged to Steevens, was purchased for the private library of George III., and was retained when George IV. gave that valuable collection to the nation. treatise might be written upon its wisdom. It is the history of a life, from the condition of " a little tiny boy," through "man's estate," to decaying age-" when I came unto my bed ;" and the conclusion is, that what is true of the individual is true of the species, and what was of yesterday was of generations long past away-for "A great while ago the world begun." Steevens says this "nonsensical ditty" is utterly unconnected with the subject of the comedy. We think he is mistaken. POSTSCRIPT TO TWELFTH NIGHT. THERE is a remarkable passage in this comedy which has been supposed to bear upon the domestic history of Shakspere. We believe that such conjectures are in general founded upon a misapprehension of the dramatic spirit in which he worked; and that such notions especially as that he was himself jealous, because he has so truly depicted the passion of jealousy,—or that he had himself felt the bitter pang of filial irreverence, because he had written, "Ingratitude! thou marble-hearted fiend, More hideous, when thou show'st thee in a child, are altogether idle and worthless. The details, however, of Shakspere's private life are so few, and the facts and traditions which have come down to us require such careful examination, that we need not be surprised that the language which he has held to be characteristic of the persons and incidents of his dramas should have been deemed, with more or less ingenuity, to be characteristic of himself, his actions, and his circumstances. Amongst the least overstrained of these applications is the passage in Twelfth Night to which we have alluded; and the inferences to be drawn from it are recommended by the opinion of one of the most original of living prose-writers : "Shakspere himself, looking back on his youthful history from his maturest years, breathes forth pathetic counsels against the errors into which his own inexperience had been ensnared. The disparity of years between himself and his wife he notices in a beautiful scene of the Twelfth Night. The Duke Orsino, observing the sensibility which the pretended Cesario had betrayed on hearing some touching old snatches of a love-strain, swears that his beardless page must have felt the passion of love, which the other admits. Upon this the dialogue proceeds thus: "Duke. What kind of woman is 't? Viola. Duke. Too old, by heaven: Let still the woman take An elder than herself; so wears she to him, So sways she level in her husband's heart. For, boy, however we do praise ourselves, Our fancies are more giddy and unfirm, More longing, wavering, sooner lost and worn, "These counsels were uttered nearly twenty years after the event in his own life to which they probably look back; for this play is supposed to have been written in Shakspere's thirty-eighth year. And we may read an earnestness in pressing the point as to the inverted disparity of years, which indicates pretty clearly an appeal to the lessons of his personal experience."* It is not our purpose in this place to enter into any minute examination of the reasonableness of the application of these lines to Shakspere's domestic history. Upon the general principle which * Mr. De Quincey's Life of Shakspere in the Encyclopædia Britannica,' 7th edit., vol. xx. p. 179. |