"Yet am I thankful: if my heart were great
'Twould burst at this: Captain I'll be no more;
But I will eat and drink, and sleep as soft

As captain shall; simply the thing I am

Shall make me live. Who knows himself a braggart
Let him fear this; for it will come to pass,

That every braggart shall be found an ass.
Rust, sword! cool, blushes! and, Parolles, live
Safest in shame! being fool'd by foolery thrive!
There's place and means for every man alive."

And he will "live.' Lafeu understands him to the last, when he says,
a knave, you shall eat."

"Though you are a fool and

And is this crawling, empty, vapouring, cowardly representative of the off-scourings of social life, to be compared for a moment with the unimitable Falstaff?-to be said to have " many lineaments in common "with him-to be thrown into the shade by him-to be even "a little appendix " to his greatness? Parolles is drawn by Shakspere as utterly contemptible, in intellect, in spirit, in morals. He is diverting from the situations into which his folly betrays him; and his complete exposure and humiliation constitute the richness of the comedy. If he had been a particle better Shakspere would have made his disgrace less; and it is in his charity even to the most degraded that he has represented him as utterly insensible to his own shame, and even hugging it as a good:"If my heart were great

'T would burst at this."

But Falstaff, witty beyond all other characters of wit-cautious, even to the point of being thought cowardly-swaying all men by his intellectual resources under the greatest difficulty— boastful and lying only in a spirit of hilarity which makes him the first to enjoy his own detection -and withal, though grossly selfish, so thoroughly genial that many love him and few can refuse to laugh with him-is Falstaff to be compared with Parolles, the notorious liar-great way foolsolely a coward? The comparison will not bear examining with patience, and much less with pains-taking.

But Parolles in his own way is infinitely comic. "The scene of the drum," according to a French critic, "is worthy of Molière." This is the highest praise which a French writer could bestow; and here it is just. The character belongs to the school of which Molière is the head, rather than to the school of Shakspere.

And what shall we say of the Clown? Ho is "the artificial fool;" and we do not like him, therefore, quite so much as dear Launce and dearer Touchstone. To the Fool in Lear he can no more be compared than Parolles to Falstaff. But he is, nevertheless, great-something that no other artist but Shakspere could have produced. Our poet has used him as a vehicle for some biting satire. There can be no doubt that he is "a witty fool," "a shrewd knave, and an unhappy."

STATE OF THE TEXT, AND CHRONOLOGY, OF MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING.

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING was first printed in 1600, under the following title :-'Much Adoe about Nothing. As it hath been sundrie times publikely acted by the Right Honourable the Lord Chamberlaine his Servants. Written by William Shakespeare. Printed by V. J. for Andrew Wise and William Aspley, 1600.' It had been entered at Stationers' Hall on the 23rd of August of the same year. There had probably been an attempt to pirate this play; for in a leaf of irregular entries prefixed to a volume of the Stationers' Register we find, under date of August 4th, but without a

Wise and Aspley were, no doubt, the authorised publishers of this play, as they were of others of the original quartos. The first edition is not divided into acts; but in the folio of 1623 we find this division. There was no other separate edition. The variations between the text of the quarto and that of the folio are very few: we have pointed out any important difference. There is a remarkable peculiarity, however, in the text of the folio, which indicates very clearly that it was printed from the playhouse copy. In the second act (Scene III.) we find this stage direction :-"Enter

Prince, Leonato, Claudio, and Jack Wilson.' In the third act, when the two inimitable guardians of the night first descend upon the solid earth in Messina, to move mortals for ever after with unextinguishable laughter, they speak to us in their well-known names of Dogberry and Verges; but in the fourth act we find the names of mere human actors prefixed to what they say: Dogberry becomes Kempe, and Verges Cowley. Here, then, we have a piece of the prompter's book before us. Balthazar, with his "Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more," is identified with Jack Wilson; and Kempe and Cowley have come down to posterity in honourable association with the two illustrious compartners of the watch." We could almost believe that the player-editors of the folio in 1623 purposely left these anomalous entries as an historical tribute to the memory of their fellows. Kempe, we know, had been dead some years before the publication of the folio; and probably Cowley and Jack Wilson had also gone where the voice of their merriment and their minstrelsy was heard no more.

The chronology of this comedy is sufficiently fixed by the circumstance of its publication in 1600, coupled with the fact that it is not mentioned by Meres in 1598. Chalmers has a notion that the return of the prince and his companions from the wars" conveys a temporary allusion to the Irish campaign of Essex in 1599. When Beatrice says "Yes; you had musty victuals, and he hath holp to eat it," Chalmers detects a sarcasm upon the badness of the provisions furnished to Essex's army, which, according to Camden and other historical authorities, were not of the daintiest. We have little faith in this species of evidence.

SUPPOSED SOURCE OF THE PLOT.

"THE story is taken from Ariosto," says Pope. To Ariosto then we turn; and we are repaid for our labour by the pleasure of reading that long but by no means tedious story of Genevra, which occupies the whole of the fifth book, and part of the sixth, of the Orlando Furioso. "The tale is a pretty comical matter," as Harrington quaintly pronounces it. The famous town of St. Andrew's forms its scene; and here was enacted something like that piece of villainy by which the Claudio of Shakspere was deceived, and his Hero "done to death, by slanderous tongues." In Harrington's good old translation of the Orlando there are six-and-forty pictures, as there are sixand-forty books; and, says the translator, "they are all cut in brass, and most of them by the best workmen in that kind that have been in this land this many years; yet I will not praise them too much because I gave direction for their making." The witty godson of Queen Elizabeth"that merry poet my godson "-adds, "the use of the picture is evident, which is that having read over the book you may read it as it were again in the very picture." He might have said, you may read it as it were before; and if we had copied this picture,-in which the whole action of the book is exhibited at once in a bird's-eye view, and were yet, as he who gave "direction for its making" truly says, "the personages of men, the shapes of horses, and such like, are made large at the bottom and lesser upward,"—our readers would have seen at a glance how far "the story is taken from Ariosto." For here we have, "large at the bottom," a fair one at a window, looking lovingly upon a man who is ascending a ladder of ropes, whilst at the foot of the said ladder an unhappy wight is about to fall upon his sword, from which fate he is with difficulty arrested by one who is struggling with him. We here see at once the resemblance between the story in Ariosto and the incident in Much Ado about Nothing upon which both the tragic and comic interest of the play hinges. But here the resemblance ceases. As we ascend the picture, we see the King of Scotland seated upon a royal throne, but no Dogberry; his disconsolate daughter is placed by his side,-but there is no veiled Hero; King, and Princess, and courtiers, and people, are looking upon a tilting-ground, where there is a fierce and deadly encounter of two mailed knights,-but there is no Beatrice and no Benedick. The truth is, that Ariosto found the incident of a lady betrayed to suspicion and danger by the personation of her own waiting-woman amongst the popular traditions of the south of Europe-this story has been traced to Spain; and he interwove it with the adventures of his Rinaldo as an integral part of his chivalrous romance. The lady Genevra, so falsely accused, was doomed to die unless a true knight came within a month