not very long after the "Merchant of Venice;" and "Hamlet" was, after "Twelfth Night," possibly the next play that Shakespeare wrote.

While all that was gross in old forms of the tale of brother and sister disappears in Shakespeare's treatment of it, the ideal of young love has its finer life brought out by contrast with the doings of Sir Toby and his friends. This use of contrast is akin to the artistic heightening of our sense of the ideal in the "Midsummer Night's Dream," by using as a foil to the bright fancy that plays through the fairy scenes the comic dulness of Nic Bottom and his friends.

In the city of Illyria there is a young Duke Orsino inspired by nature with sweet yearnings after love. He is in the position of young Romeo enamoured of fair Rosaline. Nature begets a desire, and Chance, that determines Rosaline as the first object, may transfer it to a Juliet, but the yearning itself lies in the fine spirit of youth that no chance of outward fortune can destroy. The First Act of "Twelfth Night" opens to soft music with suggestion of this, in lines full of the delicious sense of harmony :

"If music be the food of love, play on :

Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken and so die.

That strain again;-it had a dying fall:

O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour.” *

The fitful and swift movements of love fancy are expressed in the next lines:

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Enough; no more :

'T is not so sweet now as it was before.

O, spirit of love, how quick and fresh art thou,
That notwithstanding thy capacity

Receiveth as the sea, nought enters there,

Of what validity and pitch soe'er,

But falls into abatement and low price,

Even in a minute! So full of shapes is fancy,

That it alone is high-fantastical."

Pope, in his edition of Shakespeare, altered in this passage "sound to "south," and the change has been generally accepted. It is vaguely poetical; but the rustle of the summer breeze over the crisp leaves and blossoms of a bank of violets, stealing and giving odour, is an image more clearly presented to the mind when the word is left as, I believe, Shakespeare wrote it.

The first lines having thus struck the keynote of the play, a short dialogue begins the story. Near to the duke's palace is the house of a rich maiden, daughter of a count who has been twelve months dead. Her brother, who had succeeded to his father's large possessions, has also died, and she inherits all. She pleads long mourning for her

brother against the duke's suit for her love.

There is set over her great household a stately steward, who is capable and faithful, only ridiculous through his self-love.

There is in her household Feste, her father's fool, a skilled musician.

As sons of gentlemen wore great lords' liveries, so this great lady has in the service of her chamber a maid, Maria, well enough educated to have a handwriting like her own, well enough dressed to make it doubtful to Viola, when first seeing Olivia and Maria together, which is the lady of the house.

A greedy uncle, who would live jovially at other folks' expense, Sir Toby Belch, has quartered himself upon his young niece, and has invited to share his corner in the great house a rich dull-witted knight, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, whom he brings in as his niece's wooer, and so means to gull out of a substantial part of his income of three thousand ducats a year. We learn, indeed, that he has got possession of two thousand of his friend's ducats before the year is out. Thus Sir Toby keeps his own money untouched, draws a good income from Sir Andrew, and lives riotously at his niece's cost.

A well-to-do knight, who is so jovial and so thrifty withal, is, in Maria's eyes, worth catching for a husband. She is angling for him, and will catch him. There is no young dream in her love: Sir Toby and Maria pair with a love that is not, like the duke's, than the world," it does prize "quantity of dirty lands.”

more noble

The play is a tale of two households-Olivia's and Orsino's--as they are affected by the coming of the brother and sister who seem doubles of each other. The time of action of the play is three months. "Three months this youth hath tended upon me," says Orsino of Viola in the Fifth Act. But the three months are supposed to pass between the third and fourth scenes of the First Act. From the fourth scene of the First Act to the end of the play, the time of action is two days.

Brother and sister, Viola and Sebastian, are thrown separately ashore on the coast of Illyria from a wreck, and the saving of Viola, with her resolve to serve the duke for a time as a page, is set between the first scene, showing the duke's love-passion, and the third scene, which sets forth the relations of Sir Toby Belch with Sir Andrew Aguecheek, and Maria humouring Sir Toby.

Then the three months pass, and we find Viola, as the boy Cesario, high in Orsino's confidence, employed by him as ambassador of love to Olivia. And she is faithful in the trust, although her own dream of love has come to her, with Orsino for ideal. In the fifth scene we may note that the Clown has a quick eye for Maria's policy. "Well, go thy way," he says: "if Sir Toby would leave drinking, thou wert as witty a piece of Eve's flesh as any in Illyria." To which Maria replies, "Peace, you rogue; no more o' that."

When Malvolio speaks contemptuously of the Clown-whereby he whets in him the appetite for a revenge to come-Olivia defines her steward's weakness: "O, you are sick of self-love, Malvolio, and taste with a distempered appetite." "Richard III." gives us the tragic side of life to a man's self alone-" Richard loves Richard. That is, I am I." In Malvolio we may say we have the same fault shown on the comic side. Malvolio aspires to the hand of Olivia as Richard to the crown, with motives alike selfish and therefore mean.

Thus we have the young love that sacrifices all to its ideal, in Orsino, Viola, Olivia, brighter by contrast with the less ethereal ways by which Sir Toby and Maria become man and wife, and with the yet more opposite nature of the man by self-love wedded to himself.

The First Act ends with Olivia's love fixed upon the youth Cesario, upon the sister saved out of the shipwreck.

The Second Act begins by opening the story of the shipwrecked brother. Of his escape from drowning, it may be observed that hope enough was given to Viola in the second scene of the First Act to take the tragic element out of the action of the play. The captain then had said,

"I saw your brother,

Most provident in peril, bind himself

Courage and hope both teaching him the practice

To a strong mast, that lived upon the sea;

Where like Arion on the dolphin's back,
I saw him hold acquaintance with the waves
So long as I could see.

Viola.

For saying so there's gold,

Mine own escape unfoldeth to my hope

Whereto thy speech serves for authority-
The like of him."

Sebastian had been saved by Antonio when he was a wreck past hope, and after three months' nursing is fully recovered. He goes to the town; Antonio following. "When came he to this town?" Orsino asks at the end; and Antonio replies:

"To-day, my lord; and for three months before
No interim, not a minute's vacancy,

Both day and night did we keep company."

"To-day" here means the second day of the action after the third scene of the First Act. At the end of the First Act Viola had left Olivia, and Malvolio was sent after her with a ring. After the scene that prepares for Sebastian's coming, we have in the Second Act Malvolio following with the ring, and asking Viola, "Were not you even now with the Countess Olivia?" Viola replies, "Even now, sir." In the third scene of the Second Act it is night of the same day. Sir Toby and his friends are making a night of it. Malvolio comes as steward to rebuke them-again preparing the way for a retaliation on himself and Maria says: "Sweet Sir Toby, be patient for to-night. Since the youth of the Count's was to-day with my lady, she is much out of quiet. For Monsieur Malvolio, let me alone with him." It may be worth noting that when, immediately afterwards, Maria says of Malvolio, "sometimes he is a kind of Puritan," it is into the mouth of the witless Sir Andrew Aguecheek that Shakespeare puts an expression of unreasoning ill-will to the name :

“Sir Andrew. O, if I thought that, I'd beat him like a dog.

Sir Toby. What, for being a Puritan! Thy exquisite reason, dear knight?

Sir Andrew. I have no exquisite reason for 't, but I have reason good enough."

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And to the same imbecile knight Shakespeare gives (Act III., scene 2) a reference to the Brownists, who were much dreaded in Elizabeth's time for their advocacy of freedom of opinion in matters of doctrine. Policy I hate," says Sir Andrew; "I had as lief be a Brownist as a politician." Was not this meant for good-natured satire upon that unreasoning clamour against earnest men which comes often from poverty of wit?

The first day of action, after the three months' interval, ends with the third scene of the Second Act, when Sir Toby's making a night of it has gone far into the morning. "Come, come," he says, "I'll go burn some sack, 't is too late to go to bed now."

The next scene opens in Orsino's palace with the morning of the second day. To this one day all following incidents of the play belong. There is again the prelude of soft music :-

"Give me some music ;-now, good morrow, friends :

Now, good Cesario, but that piece of song,

That old and antique song we heard last night."

Feste, the clown, who is to sing it, is not at hand. Let the music then be played until he comes. And so the spirit of young love then speaks again with music in the air.

In this scene is a passage that has been perverted into show of evidence that Shakespeare was not happy in his wife Anne, because she was older than he, although there is no good ground whatever for supposing that Shakespeare's married life was unhappy. Orsino asks Cesario if his fancy has been caught by some far favour. Viola answers, A little, by your favour." "What kind of woman is't?" "Of your complexion." "She is not worth thee, then. What years,

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i' faith?" "About your years, my lord?" "Too old, by heaven." And then Orsino reasons that the woman should take an older than herself,

"For, boy, however we do praise ourselves,

Our fancies are more giddy and unfirm,

More longing, wavering, sooner lost and won,

Than women's are ;"

which reasoning, before the end of the scene, Orsino, in the fitfulness of his love fancies, absolutely reverses:

"There is no woman's sides

Can bide the beating of so strong a passion

As love doth give my heart; no woman's heart
So big to hold so much: they lack retention.
Alas! their love may be called appetite,
No motion of the liver, but the palate,

That suffers surfeit, cloyment, and revolt."

Here, as elsewhere, the variation is designed. Between the earlier and later view of the relative powers of love in men and women is an interval of about ten minutes, within which the Clown has said to Orsino, "The melancholy god protect thee, and the tailor make thy doublet of changeable taffeta, for thy mind is a very opal. I would have men of such constancy put to sea, that their business might be everything, and their intent everywhere." Certainly those critics have put to sea who suppose a dramatist is thinking of himself when he is living in the persons of his story.

Sir Toby's delight in Maria's trick upon Malvolio completes her conquest of him. "I could marry the wench," he says, "for this." Sir Andrew, with no more wit of his own than an echo, says, "So could I too." "And ask no other dowry with her but such another