XII. MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING. I NEVER knew any one object to the nature and conduct of Beatrice in "Much Ado About Nothing," who was not either dull in faculty, ill-tempered, or an overweening assertor of the exclusive privileges of the male sex. The late Thomas Campbell, in an edition of the poet, denounces her as 66 an odious woman." I never saw Mr Campbell, and knew nothing of him personally; I can say nothing, therefore, of his temper, or of his jealousy as regards the privileges claimed by the stronger party in the human world; and most certain am I that he was not a man of "dull faculty," for I do know his intellectual character. But I should be inclined to draw a conclusion from the epithet used by that elegant poet and cultivated scholar, that he was a man subject to strong impulses, and to a high degree of nervous irritability; and that he had risen from his task of editing this enchanting play, annoyed and excited by the sparring between Beatrice and Benedick, in which wordencounters she certainly is no "light weight" to him; but to call her "odious" was an injudicious comment, and only true as regards his own individual temperament and feelings. In the general estimation of the world, Beatrice is one of those who wear their characters inside out. They have no reserves with society, for they require none. They may, perhaps, presume upon, or rather forget that they possess a mercurial temperament, which, when unreined, is apt to start from its course and inconvenience their fellow-travellers; but such a propensity is not an "odious" one-it is not hateful; and this is the only feature in the character of Beatrice that Mr Campbell could object to. She is warm-hearted, generous; has a noble contempt of baseness of every kind; is wholly untinctured with jealousy; is the first to break out into invective when her cousin Hero is treated in that scoundrel manner by her affianced husband at the very altar, and even makes it a sine quâ non with Benedick to prove his love for herself by challenging the traducer of her cousin. This last fact, by the way, leads to a natural digression when speaking of the career of Beatrice; and that is, that the very circumstance of her embroiling her lover in a duel for another person is of itself a proof that the sensual passion of love had no predominant share in her choice of Benedick for a husband; and in this insignificant-apparently insignficant-but momentous point of conduct, we again, and for the thousandth time, recognise Shakespeare's unsleeping sense of propriety in character. A woman, personally and passionately in love, has been known to involve her lover where her own self-love has been compromised; and even then I should question the quality of the passion; that, however strong it might be, it was weaker than her own self-worship; for the sterling passion of love, by the law of nature, is allabsorbing, all-engrossing, and admits no equal near the throne. But no woman, so enamoured, would place her lover's life in jeopardy for a third party; and this leads me to retrace my position and observe, that the union of Beatrice and Benedick was only a "counterfeit presentment" of ninetynine hundredths of the marriages that take place in society, |