court.

The play within the play now takes the place of the woodland masque; but the same opposition of the crass mind with art is subtly echoed in the enactment of the interlude, and the scene is still illusory, though now with the illusion of art.

Character, plot, incident, situation, dialogue, — it is plain that the interest of the play, the charm that has made it a marvel of fantasy and beauty, does not lie in these, but in the diffused dream-atmosphere in which all of life is breathing in the enchanted night. Illusion

is the theme to which the play returns in Protean shapes. In its grossest form, the illusion of the senses, which is such a stumbling-block to the hard-headed workingmen of Athens, it is given only by the instrumentality of Puck, the mischief-maker; he transforms Bottom to his marvellous self, the ass-headed one, and he misleads the angry lovers, keeping them apart in the tangled wood. The illusion of the heart appears at every turn and in various disguises: humanly speaking, love is the only interest of the play, and love is the illusion of the heart. So it seems, though obscurely and poetically, to the happy pair of eloping lovers, who in that lyrical part for part chorused dialogue, in which they take up each other's words as in a little song, join in speaking of it, Elizabethanwise, as

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Momentany as a sound,
Swift as a shadow, short as any dream;

Brief as the lightning in the collied night,

That, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth,
And ere a man hath power to say 'Behold!'

The jaws of darkness do devour it up."

More clearly to Helena, seeing how love's enchantment works on the deceived Demetrius disdainfully abandoning her charms for Hermia, its true nature is apparent as she uses the stock-expression of Elizabethan lovepsychology:

"Things base and vile, holding no quantity,

Love can transpose to form and dignity :

Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind;
And therefore is wing'd Cupid painted blind:
Nor hath love's mind of any judgement taste;
Wings, and no eyes, figure unheedy haste :
And therefore is Love said to be a child,
Because in choice he is so oft beguiled."

In the wood the juice of the little flower of lovers, on which Cupid's arrow fell when he shot harmlessly at the virgin votaress of the West, distilled on the eyes of Valentine made him pursue Helena, and with changed affections call her

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goddess, nymph, divine and rare, Precious, celestial;

on the eyes of Titania made her wake to mirror the tender vision of the ass's head, engarlanded with flowers, curried by the patient Cobweb and Mustardseed, with “a great desire to a bottle of hay"; on the eyes of Demetrius gave him back to wronged Helena, never to change more, the gift of Oberon, gentle to lovers, who took not off the powerful charm. The lovers woke deeming Theseus with his hounds a vision of that sleep-cumbered night, where, as if it had been Morpheus's own realm every one

But

fell to slumber with the frequency and inconsequence of childhood or old age in its neglected corner. the great illusion is the illusion of art.

It is stated with philosophical precision in the front of the last act, which is its sphere;

"Such tricks hath strong imagination;

That, if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy."

It is described as the function of the poet:

"And, as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen

Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name."

"

It is put forth by Theseus as the essence of all art: "The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them." This is that great shadow-idea, one of the few that are constant in Shakespeare, whose persistence through all his thought is so marked a characteristic. King Richard's mirror is an early example; and here, in this play, Oberon, who is a prophecy of Prospero, is named "King of Shadows." Thus Oberon, who controls the action of the play, is the master spirit of its idea.

Illusion in these various forms, involving the whole compass of life, is strongly supported on all sides by the lyrical element which is also omnipresent. It appears, characteristically, in that opening song-dialogue of Lysander and Hermia; it is the natural speech, song

speech, of Puck and the fairies in the induction to the fairy world; and it governs the close in those songs of blessing which Coleridge thought the English notes of a better Anacreon. But it is more pervasive than this; its pastoralism gives the atmosphere, and detail as well, to the rural description, and absorbs all nature in its own point of view in the account of the blight that had fallen on the land: it yields those idyl pictures of girlhood friendship, Cupid shooting his bolt into the West, Hermia's awaking, the Indian boy's mother, the hounds of Theseus, which enamel the verse; and throughout it inspires the infinite touches of golden word and melodious cadence which make the language of such surpassing beauty and pure vocal charm. It is in such a garment of lyricism that the theme of illusion is clothed, and it is thrown over the humour as well as the beauty of the play. It seems sometimes that Shakespeare in "the Northern Island sundered once from all the human race was the crest of the Renaissance that there and in him reached its climax; the historical perspective of three centuries is not yet enough to let this be certainly said; but in "A Midsummer Night's Dream," how much there is characteristic of the great Italian mood of Europe, idyllic, pastoral, delighting in beauty, painting the frieze of the world with mingled loveliness and grotesqueness, but on no part of it, however Cupid and monster wreathed, such a twine of delicacy and fun as the creatures and pranks of Oberon's court in the wood.

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Many of the plays of Shakespeare appear to be climacteric, and there may be error in ascribing such swift

and mighty changes even to the soul most capable of education of all born of English earth. If the view here taken have any colour of probability, if it be not in its turn a dreaming of the mind, this play discloses as its main characteristic the ripened presence of the poetical faculty, exceeding in value and power the human material with which the dramatist dealt; here Shakespeare at the height of his lyrical inspiration, at the climax of the modes of power possible to its exercise, has reached for the time being a limit. The eloquence of Richard has become, not the passion of Lear, not the natural elevation of Hamlet even, but pure poetry; here the experimental study of Biron has become the mastery of the nature of art in its substance beyond the form; here the handling of the dramatic means of earlier comedy and history has become so habitual that it ceases to occupy any special place or prominence. A supremacy of power in many ways has been achieved. But the sign and proof of excellency in the poetical faculty, which is here to the fore, is the temper of grace by which humour itself is transformed. Bottom, even, in his adornments of flower and leaf, with the doting fondness of the queen of the fairies and the ministries of the sweet winged courtiers, becomes almost poetical. To poetise humour is the last victory of the spirit of the beautiful. Courtesy wins a similar noble triumph in the human sphere, when Theseus lays down its law, finding grace in halting words and simple virtue in the awkward service of even the coarse-handed and rude-minded craftsmen of Athens turned poet and player in their lowest