folio is made "self-same king." This emendation supplies a syllable much needed both for sense and metre. Mr. Knight's interpretation of the passage seems to me to be obviously the true one. He says: "The phrase ought probably to be her sweet perfection.' The filling of the sovereign thrones' is the perfection of Olivia's merits." Capell gave, in his edition :

"when liver, brain and heart, Those sovereign thrones, are all supplied and filled (Her sweet perfection) with one self-same king."

This is evidently the true reading. Mr. Knight quotes from Froissart to show that it was anciently believed, that a well-assorted marriage was necessary to the "perfection of a woman. Is not the quotation a little superfluous ? Has that belief yet entirely died out? And does not the whole of the Duke's speech point to the full development of Olivia's nature, by her love of him who is to fill her heart?

SCENE 2.

"Vio. O that I served that lady,

And might not be deliver'd to the world

Till I had made mine own occasion mellow
What my state is."

Hear the great commentators of the last century upon this passage, and upon the character of Viola!

"And might not be delivered to the world.] I wish I might not be made public to the world, with regard to the state of my birth and fortune, till I have gained a ripe opportunity for my design.

Viola seems to have formed a very deep design with very little premeditation she is thrown by shipwreck on an unknown coast, hears that the prince is a bachelor, and resolves to supplant the lady whom he courts." JOHNSON.

"In the novel on which Shakespeare founded this play, the Duke Apollonius being driven by a tempest on the isle of Cyprus, Silla, the daughter of the governor, falls in love with him, and on his departure goes in pursuit of him. All this Shakespeare knew, and probably intended in some future scene to tell, but afterwards forgot it. If this were not the case, the impropriety censured by Dr. Johnson must be accounted for from the poet's having here, as in other places, sometimes adhered to the fable he had in view, and sometimes departed from it. Viola, in a subsequent scene, plainly alludes to her having been secretly in love with the Duke:

'My father had a daughter lov'd a man,
As it might be perhaps, were I a woman,
I should, your lordship.

And what's her history?

Duke.
Vio. A blank, my lord, she never told her love!

," &c.

MALONE.

"It would have been inconsistent with Viola's delicacy to have made an open confession of her love for the Duke to the Captain."

BOSWELL.

Variorum Shakespeare, vol. XI, p. 347.

And upon Viola's remark "I'll serve this duke" in her next speech, Johnson adds:

'Viola is an excellent schemer, never at a loss; if she cannot

serve the lady, she will serve the Duke."

Ibid. p. 348.

And this is the appreciation which Shakespeare's labors met at the hands of such men as Johnson and Malone!

The great moralist' could be so bisson blind as to call the most unsophisticated and self-sacrificing character in the whole range of fiction "an excellent schemer," and attribute to her the formation of a deep design to supplant a lady in the affections of her lover! How this could happen, is incomprehensible; for an appreciation of Viola's gentle and unselfish character is not necessary to prevent such a misapprehension; it needs but to read the text with a reasonable degree of attention, to see that such a supposition has not the least foothold on probability. Malone's supposition, that Shakespeare forgot to tell us that Viola had started in pursuit of the Duke, and his opinion, that Viola "plainly alludes to her having been secretly in love with the Duke," as well as Boswell's defence of Viola, on the ground that her delicacy would forbid her to tell the Captain of her love for the Duke, are all equally preposterous, and show that all three of the critics were equally ignorant of the subject on which they spoke, and equally unable to sympathize with the character which they grossly asperse, or traduce no less by a pitiful defence.

Viola is shipwrecked, and cast upon a coast unknown to her; and when she finds out where she is, she asks,

"And what should I do in Illyria?"

She had heard her father name Orsino, but had never seen him. In her abandoned and dejected state, she longs to get into the service of a lady who

"hath abjur'd the company

And sight of men,"

and not to be "delivered to the world" till her opportunities and her talents had enabled her to better her then forlorn

condition. She is told that she cannot get an audience of this lady; and then, perforce, is obliged to seek the protection of the Duke, which she does, not as a beautiful girl in distress, but in the very disguise most calculated to prevent him from taking any personal interest in her. But the danger proves to be reversed. She loves him deeply, hopelessly; and yet at his bidding she goes to his "sovereign cruelty," effects the entrance denied to all others, and pleads his cause with such a fervor, that it would seem she was suing for her own happiness, rather than asking for that, which, in her own words, would make her life "a blank." In her disguise she captivates the very woman whose love she has sought for another; and so far is she from rejoicing at this check upon the Duke's designs, or finding a malicious and almost pardonable pleasure in the fatal and ludicrous passion her rival, that she exclaims, repenting of her disguise, and pitying her master:

"I am the man ;-If it be so, (as 'tis,)
Poor lady, she were better love a dream.
Disguise, I see, thou art a wickedness,
Wherein the pregnant enemy does much.
How easy is it for the proper false

In women's waxen hearts to set their forms!
Alas, our frailty is the cause, not we;

For, such as we are made of, such we be.

How will this fadge? My master loves her dearly:

And I, poor monster, fond as much on him;

And she, mistaken, seems to dote on me;

What will become of this! As I am man,

My state is desperate for my master's love:

As I am woman,—now alas the day!

What thriftless sighs shall poor Olivia breathe!

O time, thou must untangle this, not I;

It is too hard a knot for me to untie."

And this is the woman whom Samuel Johnson, LL. D. could call a schemer, and accuse of a deep, selfish design;

and whom Malone and Boswell could suppose in love with the Duke, forgetting, the while, that at the time when they defend her from the indelicacy of confessing her love for him to another, she had never seen him. Malone's supposition, that Viola's beautiful allusion to herself in the story which she tells the Duke of her pretended sister, is an allusion to her "having been secretly in love with him,”—that is, of course, in love with him before the play opens,-is too absurd to merit notice. Indeed, indeed, the best part of Shakespeare was written in an unknown tongue to these learned gentlemen. If there ever were an ingenuous, unsophisticated, unselfish character portrayed, it is this very Viola,-Dr. Johnson's "excellent schemer," who, wretched and in want, forms that "very deep design" of supplanting a high-born beauty of whom she has never heard, in the affections of a man of princely rank, whom she has never

seen.

SCENE 3.

"Sir Tob. An thou let part so, Sir Andrew, would thou might'st never draw sword again."

It seems not improbable that her dropped out between "let" and "part" as Mr. Collier's folio suggests. An intelligent friend, however, who has read Shakespeare much, and the comments on him, not at all, on seeing this admission, remarked:-"An thou let part so,' is better as it is. Shakespeare dropped her himself.-Let stupidity pick her up." I am more than half inclined to think with him.

,

"Sir And. Ay, 'tis strong, and does indifferent well in a flame coloured stock."