ment he encountered. He is honest and zealous in his stewardship, and is so far estimable; and he has his reward in the confidence and favour of his mistress. But his honesty is bitter, and his zeal is overweening: and being so dragonlike and "virtuous," he would banish all the "cakes and ale" from good fellowship. He is a moral teatotaller, a formalist, a pragmatist, and a self-worshipper. His gravity is that of decorum, of punctilio; he is solemn in observance; sober, sedate, and inflexible in ceremonial. He would suffer amputation of a limb rather than that of a ceremony. He cannot perceive the entertainment of jesting, either spoken or listened to, and marvels that his mistress can tolerate, far more take delight in the sallies of her jester—the fooleries of the fool. He has measureless and acrid contempt for those who can endure such toys of mirth. He says, "I protest, I take these wise men, that crow so at these set kind of fools, no better than the fools' zanies." He is so steeped in, so saturated with the idolatry of decorum, as the one thing needful, that he far outstrips his mistress's injunctions in the control of her household; and exercises his office with a bitterness of rectitude, even a malignity of precision, that may be resolved into a compounded love of power and love of propriety. Even in such a trifle as the execution of her commission respecting the restoration of the ring to Viola, as the page, he goes far beyond his duty. Olivia simply bids him hasten after the messenger, and return the ring, which she feigns was left with her but Malvolio, when he overtakes the page, represents his mistress as highly incensed: he exaggerates her message, and flings the ring back. There was no question of throwing it; but Malvolio says, "Come, sir, you peevishly threw it to her, and her will is, it should be so returned. If it be worth stooping for, there it lies in your eye; if not, be it his that finds it." All this fluster may have arisen from a horror of the steward, in the idea that his darling formula of "decorum" had been violated in the page's having made an extempore love-declaration to the Lady Olivia. Certain it is, that he nurses his own disdain, while pretending to be the medium of his mistress's displeasure. So also, when interrupting the night-revel of Sir Toby and his co-mates, we feel that he is quite as much venting his ill-temper at the hilarity and the roistering, as that he is conveying her reprobation of their obstreperous merriment. With austere relish of his rebuke, he says: "My masters, are you mad? or what are you? Have you no wit, manners, nor honesty, but to gabble like tinkers at this time of night? Do ye make an ale-house of my lady's house, that you squeak out your coziers' catches, without any mitigation or remorse of voice? Is there no respect of place, persons, nor time, in you? "Sir To. We did 'keep time,' sir, in our catches. Sneck up! 'Three merry men we be."" Perfect is this scene and situation! with the pompous man in authority, surrounded, and bated by the hubbub of the roisterers they persisting in bawling their wine-songs, as a note of his indignation; and, in answer to his remonstrances, screaming a chorus. His gravity has no odds against their ungovernable mirth; his sobriety is fairly upset and smothered in their drunken uproar. He has nothing for it but retreat; and this he makes in as dignified ill-humour as need be, and a threat into the bargain: "My lady shall know of it, by this hand!" [Exit.] The fact is, Malvolio was intended to represent a member of that class, the main features of whose character betrayed an ostentatious moral vanity. Not satisfied with having obtained the privilege to act according to the dictates of their own consciences, and of having confirmed, in their own behalf, the right of private judgment, they proceeded to wrench that power to the restraining of all dissentients within their own pinfold. When we consider that these men had begun to influence the legislature to restrict the players in their performances; and that, if they could have instituted a puritanical autocracy, every description of dramatic entertainment, every quality of music, psalms only excepted, and they unaccompanied, would have been swept from the earth: when these provocations to resentment are considered, it is with no slight pleasure that we turn to the forbearance of our Shakespeare in drawing the character of the overweening Malvolio. He has greatly justified him at the close of the play. With his unswerving sense of even-handed justice and righteous dealing, he will not suffer us to cast away our respect for the solid qualities in the steward's character, whatever encouragement he may give to our laughing at his pragmatisms and solemn coxcombry. The last impression he gives us of him is that of respect and sympathy; and this, too, I take to be sound morality, as well as a fresh confirmation of the innate sweetness of the poet's nature. The slight and third-rate character of Fabian the servant, contains some of Shakespeare's rich waifs and strays, worthy of the first-rate of any ordinary dramatist. These are the things that suggested the taking for my subject the inferior members of his dramatis persona. There is that fine simile, for instance, at the close of Fabian's speech to Sir Andrew, whom he is rallying and hoaxing for allowing the Duke's page to cut him out in his pretensions to the hand of Olivia. Every line in it contains a figure or a metaphor. He says "She did show favour to the youth in your sight, only to exasperate you, to awake your dormouse valour, to put fire in your heart and brimstone in your liver. You should then have accosted her; and with some excellent jests, fire-new from the mint, you should have banged the youth into dumbness. This was looked for at your hand, and this was baulked: the double gilt of this opportunity you let time wash off, and you are now sailed into the north of my lady's opinion, where you will hang like an icicle on a Dutchman's beard." In Fabian's mouth, too, occurs one of the instances, out of numbers that might be quoted, of Shakespeare being always up to the high-water mark in any appeal that is made from one character to another. When Sir Toby desires to bring on the duel between Aguecheek and the page, and defers to Fabian whether the latter is not a coward, he replies, with a spice of wit quintessentialised-"A coward ?-a most devout coward, religious in it!" Fabian, as I said, is the balancewheel between the other two, to keep them in check, while they are all watching Malvolio during the famous soliloquy and letter-scene in the garden: and to this I refer you, feeling persuaded that it will lead (although for the fiftieth time) to the reading and revelling over the whole play. ་ |