The very sensuality of old Falstaff, as every body knows, is continually blossoming out into wit, as foam rises from the agitation of impure water. There is salt enough in the single character to keep whole libraries from rotting. Different critics are constantly placing Shakspeare's distinctive excellence in different things, according perhaps to the leading bent of their own minds and tastes. For he always seems to excel in whatever aspect we are most inclined to view him; and however different, and even opposite we may be to each other, he appears to us severally just like ourselves, only more so, as if he were the development of what lies enveloped in us all,-in whom all our latent peculiarities had blossomed out and gone to seed. Whenever he undertakes to be a wit, he becomes just as perfectly so as if he never had been and never could be any thing else. And, indeed, no sooner does he conceive any purpose, whether of wit or of wisdom, than all his faculties converge upon it; so that he always seems to us better now than he ever had been before, or ever could be again; and whatsoever he is now doing, we wish he 66 Nothing but that; move still, still so, and own Wherefore some have very naturally reckoned wit to be Shakspeare's peculiar faculty. And on the same principle lawyers have been wont to conjecture that he must have made the law his peculiar study, forasmuch as he is deeply skilled in the principles, and even in the technicalities of jurisprudence: and I know not where has been the divine that understood divinity so well as he did; his theology is quite as good, I suspect, as any that has since come from theological seminaries. It is even said that butchers have found something in him, which led them to suppose that he had served an apprenticeship at their trade. Thus he surpasses us all in our several vocations, and seems master of all the learning wherein the rest of us are but students. Accordingly Hazlitt, speaking of the most celebrated English poets, says: "The characteristic of Chaucer, is intensity; of Spenser, remoteness; of Milton, elevation; of Shakspeare, every thing." Far richer, however, and rarer than wit, is another quality of Shakspeare's mind. A deep, genial humour dwells in him, which is more akin to wisdom than to wit, or rather, which is a particular form of wisdom herself. As wit is the antithesis of dulness, so humour is the antithesis of contempt. Wit is more the jubilee of the head, and makes us laugh at others; humour is more the jubilee of the heart, and makes us laugh with others. Wit may co-exist with excessive pride and spitefulness of temper, with mockery and scorn; may, in fact, be made the vehicle of them; humour, genuine humour, has no fellowship with either, cannot co-exist with them at all. The Dunciad, for example, and English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, are perfect breviaries of wit, spoken from the mouths of spitfire pride and spite; each is a continued sneer; a sort of malignant, sardonic grin, backed up by the most caustic pungency, and evincing no heart at all, or a very bad heart. Again, wit manifests itself, for most part, in single expressions; it is a flash as short, generally, as it is sud den; or at best a series of scintillations following flash upon flash, and producing an appearance of continuity by its rapidity of succession, like the apparent ring of fire when one whirls rapidly a lighted stick. Humour, on the other hand, is a soft, moist, playful light, manifesting itself, in Shakspeare, in whole characters, or combinations of character, or even throughout entire plays. Falstaff and his retinue, Nick Bottom and his troop, Dogberry, Verges and company, Sir Toby Belch, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, and their associates, are, if I mistake not, conceived and executed in the spirit of the deepest, genialest humour, and Troilus and Cressida seems but a continued humorous irony on that masterpiece of ancient Quixotism, the Trojan war. Homer took altogether the serious side of the matter, and accordingly it sustains him, or rather he sustains it, perennially at the summit of epic poetry. The laughable side of the same thing seems to have been reserved on purpose for Shakspeare to make a mock tragedy out of. Cervantes, in like manner, catching the ludicrous side of chivalry, gave us the adventures of Don Quixote, and is generally ranked at the head of humorists. Perhaps, however, the humour of Cervantes only appears greater than Shakspeare's, for that in the former it is the prominent quality, whereas in the latter there is no prominence of one quality over another. Shakspeare's all-sidedness and equal-sidedness of mind would of course bring him to know the ludicrous as well as the serious side of things. Accordingly his genius ranged freely and irresistibly from the sublimest pathos to the most grotesque drollery, from the most heart-rending tragedy to the most side-shaking comedy. He understood and sympathized equally with the laughable and the lamentable, and his roar at the former was just as genuine and disinterested as his tear at the latter. His love of fun was as boundless and as innocent as his love of truth. And his "wit-combats" with Ben Jonson, so quaintly described by honest old Fuller, which were wont to "set the table on a roar," prove that as was the author such was the man. On all scores, indeed, his mind lay open equally to the ludicrous and the pathetic; he breathed upon both alike, stealing and giving pleasure. Nevertheless he is never seen hunting specially after either, but has a laugh for the one, a sigh for the other, and a voice for both, wherever he meets them. He enters to all appearances into immediate, perfect fellowship with both; recognizes them as parts of himself; delights in the laughable for its own sake, not for his fancied or real superiority to it; and laughs at it, or laughs with it, not sneeringly and spitefully, but genially and lovingly; for it need hardly be said that he saw too deeply into every thing to feel contempt at any thing. Assuredly this genial, hearty sympathy with the ludicrous is infinitely wiser and better than the self-complacent triumph over it which we sometimes hear praised. To laugh with those that laugh, is nearly or quite as commendable, as to weep with those that weep, and religion requires not so much that we should stop laughing to praise our Maker, as that we should praise Him in our laughter; which we may do by laughing at the right time and place. For there is a time to laugh and a time to weep, a time to sing and a time to dance; all of which are equally good in their place, all equally bad out of their place; and indeed there are places where it is not right to pray, such as the corner of the streets. The pride that arrays itself against the really laughable, and spurns it, and spits at it, is truly as much more ignoble as it is less delightful than a cordial fellowship with it. I say the really laughable; for to laugh at serious and sacred things, or to attempt turning them into ridicule, is alike presumptive of a wicked heart and a weak head. The vaunt of a certain scoffing persifleur, that with six witticisms a day he would banish from the world the Author of our religion, was doubtless one of the most wretched and most contemptible things ever uttered anywhere. Such sneerings of conceited sciolism are probably the sweetest incense that Satan ever snuffs up from the altar of a fool's heart! "Know that pride, Howe'er disguised in its own majesty, Is littleness; that he who feels contempt Which he has never used; that thought with him Is in its infancy. The man whose eye Is ever on himself doth look on one, The least of nature's works, one who might move Instructed that true knowledge leads to love; Who, in the silent hour of inward thought, In lowliness of heart." The accomplished author of Philip Van Artevelde very justly and beautifully says, |