their back or "misusing the king's press most damnably," he is not ashamed, but is ever ready with some quickwitted excuse. Virtue contends with the fat rogue and is worsted he is impervious to the arrows of remorse: no amount of plain tales can put him down, disturb the serenity of his chuckle, or abate his hunger and thirst for sugar and sack. It is this complete rout of Virtue by the old rascal that is so ludicrous. If his delinquencies were more serious than they are, if he were a man scattering firebrands, arrows, and death, our moral sentiments would be too much outraged to laugh over his victory. But he is comparatively harmless he is too fat "with drinking of old sack and unbuttoning after supper, and sleeping on benches after noon," to be a dangerous character: and we cannot help extending a laughing sympathy to his presence of mind, readiness of wit, volubility of tongue, and goodhumoured surrender of his person to be the occasion of wit in others. Gervinus, if I mistake not, accuses him of wanting courage. This depends upon what meaning is attached to courage. Sir John, as we know him, is not much of a fighting man; he does not fight longer than he sees reason: but he is too self-complacent and self-confident to be called a coward. In the Gadshill encounter, he heads the attack on the travellers: afterwards he makes a few passes before he runs away, while his comrades take to their heels at once: and he leads his ragamuffin company where they are peppered, although he does despise honour and fall down pretending to be dead before the infuriated Douglas. But granting his physical courage to be but small, his moral courage is dauntless. When the sheriff comes to the door of the tavern with his formidable train, Sir John is not in the least disconcerted, but is eager to have the play played out, and he falls asleep behind the arras in a situation where a cowardly breaker of the laws would have been perspiring with fear. Even the excitement of battle does not unhinge his fat composure :—

"Prince.

I prithee, lend me thy sword.

Fal. O Hal, I prithee, give me leave to breathe awhile. Turk

Gregory never did such deeds in arms as I have done this day. I have paid Percy, I have made him sure.

Prince. He is, indeed; and living to kill thee. I prithee lend me thy sword.

Fal. Nay, before God, Hal, if Percy be alive, thou get'st not my sword; but take my pistol, if thou wilt.

Prince. Give it me: what, is it in this case?

Fal. Ay, Hal; 'tis hot, 'tis hot; there's that will sack a city. [The Prince draws it out, and finds it to be a bottle of sack.]"

:

He pursues his intrigues with the "Merry Wives of Windsor" with a boldness equally imperturbable: he is not deterred by one mishap after another from again running into danger. No if we overlook Sir John's courage, we miss the essence of his humour. Sir John is no sneaking sinner : he meets all charges of iniquity with a full unabashed eye glistening out of his fat countenance, with voluble assertions of his own virtue and loud denunciations of the degeneracy of the times. After his flight from Gadshill he does not hide his face for shame, but enters the "Boar's Head" shouting for sack and exclaiming against cowardice :

"You rogue, here's lime in this sack too: there is nothing but roguery to be found in villanous man: yet a coward is worse than a cup of sack with lime in it. A villanous coward! Go thy ways, old Jack; die when thou wilt; if manhood, good manhood, be not forgot upon the face of the earth, then am I a shotten herring. There live not three good men unhanged in England; and one of them is fat and grows old: God help the while a bad world, I say. I would I were a weaver; I could sing psalms or anything. A plague of all cowards, I say still."

In his exquisite interview with the Lord Chief-Justice, he abuses these costermonger times, says he has lost his voice with halloing and singing of anthems, wishes to God his name were not so terrible to the enemy, and crowns his impudence by asking the loan of a thousand pounds. There is a good deal more than "sensual pleasure and brutishness "in the character of Sir John: it is not his sensual pleasure and brutishness that we laugh at, but the ingenuity

and brazen presence of mind with which he glosses over his vices. Humour involves a surprise of mood as wit involves a surprise of words: and Falstaff's way of taking things is certainly very different from what the ordinary way of the world leads us to expect. Sir John, too, is a wit as well as a besotted voluptuary and a willing butt for the wit of others. His ridicule of Bardolph's nose is incomparable. Down in Gloucestershire we see him watching Shallow and Slender with observant eye, and contemptuously noting their peculiarities with a view to future capital. "I will devise matter enough out of this Shallow to keep Prince Harry in continual laughter the wearing out of six fashions, which is four terms, or two actions, and a' shall laugh without intervallums."

V. THE INTER-ACTION OF HIS CHARACTERS.

A writer may have the power of expressing many varieties of passion, may have a profound sense of beauty, a quick sense of the ludicrous, and a perfect knowledge of character, and yet fail in the dramatist's most essential faculty-the power of representing one character in active influence upon another. The dramatist has to deal not with still life or with tranquil exposition: he must bring impassioned men and women face to face, and show how their words operate upon one another to comfort, to cajole, to convince, to soothe, and to inflame. The problem ever before the mind of the dramatist is, in mathematical language, to estimate the effect of a given expression on a given character in a given state of feeling. Then this effect reacts, and the reaction reacts, and other influences come in and join in the complicated process of action and reaction, so that the ability to hold your shifting data unconfused, to solve problem after problem with unerring judgment, and to keep all your results within the just limits of dramatic effect, is one of the rarest of human gifts. This is dramatic genius. Shakespeare's swiftness of intellect, fine emotional dis

crimination, and unfailing self-command, were tasked to the utmost in the representation of this reciprocal action. In his three greatest triumphs in the exhibition of what Bacon calls "working" a man-the instigation of Othello's jealousy by Iago ("Othello," iii. 3), the puffing up of Ajax's pride by Ulysses ("Troilus and Cressida," ii. 3), and the wooing of Anne by Richard III. ("Richard III.," i. 2) -the influence can hardly be said to be reciprocal: the agent stands with immovable self-possession, only keeping himself on the alert to follow up with all his dexterity the effect produced by each stroke. A similar remark may be made concerning the half-wilful torture of Juliet by her Nurse ("Romeo and Juliet," iii. 2), or the gradual agitation of Posthumus by the lies of the villain Iachimo ("Cymbeline,” ii. 4), or the annoyance and final discomfiture of the Chief-Justice by the imperturbable Falstaff ("2 Henry IV." i. 2). So, too, in the swaying of the passions of the "mutable rank-scented" Roman mob in "Coriolanus" and "Julius Cæsar," there is not much reaction: the dramatist has set himself to represent the fluctuations of an excitable crowd under the power of adroit oratory, the orator himself in each case persevering steadily in his objects. But Shakespeare did not shrink from the infinitely more difficult task of making both parties to a dialogue exert a powerful influence on each other. Of this there are memorable examples in the opening acts of " Macbeth," and in several scenes of "Coriolanus" and "Julius Cæsar." The quarrel between Brutus and Cassius ("Julius Cæsar," iv. 3), and the interview of Coriolanus with his mother, his wife, and his son ("Coriolanus," v. 3), are managed with consummate knowledge of the heart, and unerring grasp of imagination upon its slightest and most shifting fluctuations. One would not venture to say that Shakespeare's power of identifying himself with his characters, and wonderful swiftness in passing from one personality to another, increased after the time when he composed "Richard III.," and delineated the scenes between Margaret and the objects of her hatred: but certainly he increased in the masterly ease of his transi

tions. The greatest monument of his dramatic subtlety is the tragedy of "Antony and Cleopatra." With all its noble bursts of passion and occasional splendour of description, this play has not perhaps the massive breadth of feeling and overpowering interest of the four great tragedies, "Macbeth," "Hamlet," "Lear," and "Othello;" but it is greater even than "Macbeth" and "Othello" in the range of its mastery over the fluctuations of profound passion: it is the greatest of Shakespeare's plays in the dramatist's greatest faculty. The conflict of motives in "Hamlet" is an achievement of genius that must always be regarded with wonder and reverence; but, to my mind, "Antony and Cleopatra" is the dramatist's masterpiece. One may have less interest in the final end of the subtle changes wrought in the hero and heroine: but in the pursuit and certain grasp of those changes, Shakespeare's dramatic genius appears at its supreme height.

The

Schlegel quotes with approbation a saying of Lessing's regarding Shakespeare's exhibition of the gradual progress of passion from its first origin. "He gives," says Lessing, “a living picture of all the slight and secret artifices by which a feeling steals into our souls, of all the imperceptible advantages which it there gains, of all the stratagems by which it makes every other passion subservient to itself, till it becomes the sole tyrant of our desires and our aversions." This incautious hyperbole tends to confuse the boundaries between the drama and the novel or epic of manners. remark is more applicable to the novels of George Eliot, or to the "Troilus and Cressida" of Chaucer, than to the plays of Shakespeare. The slight and stealthy growth of passion is wholly unsuited for the stage. In the drama, life is condensed and concentrated; the pulses of life and the ener gies of growth are quickened. Passions spring up with more than tropical rapidity. The mutual love of Romeo and Juliet, the misanthropy of Timon, the ambition of Macbeth, Hamlet's thirst for revenge, Lear's fatal hatred of Cordelia, Othello's jealousy-are all passions of sudden growth. Iago's artifices are subtle but swift and instantaneously