and living power, that all the details spring up spontaneously in their appropriate place and form. WIT AND HUMOUR. I HAVE already alluded, in passing, to Shakspeare's wit. If the most intimate and essential relations of things are open to him, the most remote, fanciful resemblances are equally so. Accordingly, the most far-fetched and unthought-of combinations come from him with the same exquisite propriety as the most natural and life-like creations; and it is hard to say whether he has more power to startle and amuse us by his wit, or to instruct and elevate us by his wisdom. Things as far asunder as the spheres, and seemingly as oppugnant as fire and water, under his eye develop some secret affinity, and fly together into the closer union for the very distance that lay between them. For the infinite remoteness and subtilty, yet perfect appropriateness of its analogies, Mercutio's description of Queen Mab, and indeed whatever comes from Mercutio, probably surpasses any thing else in existence. The electric spark of wit lurks in his very tears, and even his sighs, while coming out, instinctively wreathe themselves into jokes. Mercutio is indeed the prince of wits, though he has many younger sisters and brothers. The character, accordingly, has long been the standard with which all other wits are compared and measured. And the same quality, though in different forms, and nowhere else with the same exquisite delicacy and polish, is scattered, like morning dews, through various other parts of the poet's works. The very sensuality of old Falstaff, as every body knows, is continually blossoming out into wit, as foam rises from the agitation of impure water. There is salt enough in the single character to keep whole libraries from rotting. Different critics are constantly placing Shakspeare's distinctive excellence in different things, according perhaps to the leading bent of their own minds and tastes. For he always seems to excel in whatever aspect we are most inclined to view him; and however different, and even opposite we may be to each other, he appears to us severally just like ourselves, only more so, as if he were the development of what lies enveloped in us all,-in whom all our latent peculiarities had blossomed out and gone to seed. Whenever he undertakes to be a wit, he becomes just as perfectly so as if he never had been and never could be any thing else. And, indeed, no sooner does he conceive any purpose, whether of wit or of wisdom, than all his faculties converge upon it; so that he always seems to us better now than he ever had been before, or ever could be again; and whatsoever he is now doing, we wish he 66 'Might ever do Nothing but that; move still, still so, and own Wherefore some have very naturally reckoned wit to be Shakspeare's peculiar faculty. And on the same principle lawyers have been wont to conjecture that he must have made the law his peculiar study, forasmuch as he is deeply skilled in the principles, and even in the technicalities of jurisprudence: and I know not where has been the divine that understood divinity so well as he did; his theology is quite as good, I suspect, as any that has since come from theological seminaries. It is even said that butchers have found something in him, which led them to suppose that he had served an apprenticeship at their trade. Thus he surpasses us all in our several vocations, and seems master of all the learning wherein the rest of us are but students. Accord ingly Hazlitt, speaking of the most celebrated English poets, says: "The characteristic of Chaucer, is intensity; of Spenser, remoteness; of Milton, elevation; of Shakspeare, every thing." Far richer, however, and rarer than wit, is another quality of Shakspeare's mind. A deep, genial humour dwells in him, which is more akin to wisdom than to wit, or rather, which is a particular form of wisdom herself. As wit is the antithesis of dulness, so humour is the antithesis of contempt. Wit is more the jubilee of the head, and makes us laugh at others; humour is more the jubilee of the heart, and makes us laugh with others. Wit may co-exist with excessive pride and spitefulness of temper, with mockery and scorn; may, in fact, be made the vehicle of them; humour, genuine humour, has no fellowship with either, cannot co-exist with them at all. The Dunciad, for example, and English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, are perfect breviaries of wit, spoken from the mouths of spitfire pride and spite; each is a continued sneer; a sort of malignant, sardonic grin, backed up by the most caustic pungency, and evincing no heart at all, or a very bad heart. Again, wit manifests itself, for most part, in single expressions; it is a flash as short, generally, as it is sud den; or at best a series of scintillations following flash upon flash, and producing an appearance of continuity by its rapidity of succession, like the apparent ring of fire when one whirls rapidly a lighted stick. Humour, on the other hand, is a soft, moist, playful light, manifesting itself, in Shakspeare, in whole characters, or combinations of character, or even throughout entire plays. Falstaff and his retinue, Nick Bottom and his troop, Dogberry, Verges and company, Sir Toby Belch, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, and their associates, are, if I mistake not, conceived and executed in the spirit of the deepest, genialest humour, and Troilus and Cressida seems but a continued humorous irony on that masterpiece of ancient Quixotism, the Trojan war. Homer took altogether the serious side of the matter, and accordingly it sustains him, or rather he sustains it, perennially at the summit of epic poetry. The laughable side of the same thing seems to have been reserved on purpose for Shakspeare to make a mock tragedy out of. Cervantes, in like manner, catching the ludicrous side of chivalry, gave us the adventures of Don Quixote, and is generally ranked at the head of humorists. Perhaps, however, the humour of Cervantes only appears greater than Shakspeare's, for that in the former it is the prominent quality, whereas in the latter there is no prominence of one quality over another. Shakspeare's all-sidedness and equal-sidedness of mind would of course bring him to know the ludicrous as well as the serious side of things. Accordingly his genius ranged freely and irresistibly from the sublimest pathos to the most grotesque drollery, from the most heart-rending tragedy to the most side-shaking comedy. He understood and sympathized equally with the laughable and the lamentable, and his roar at the former was just as genuine and disinterested as his tear at the latter. His love of fun was as boundless and as innocent as his love of truth. And his "wit-combats" with Ben Jonson, so quaintly described by honest old Fuller, which were wont to "set the table on a roar," prove that as was the author such was the man. On all scores, indeed, his mind lay open equally to the ludicrous and the pathetic; he breathed upon both alike, stealing and giving pleasure. Nevertheless he is never seen hunting specially after either, but has a laugh for the one, a sigh for the other, and a voice for both, wherever he meets them. He enters to all appearances into immediate, perfect fellowship with both; recognizes them as parts of himself; delights in the laughable for its own sake, not for his fancied or real superiority to it; and laughs at it, or laughs with it, not sneeringly and spitefully, but genially and lovingly; for it need hardly be said that he saw too deeply into every thing to feel contempt at any thing. Assuredly this genial, hearty sympathy with the ludicrous is infinitely wiser and better than the self-complacent triumph over it which we sometimes hear praised. To laugh with those that laugh, is nearly or quite as commendable, as to weep with those that weep, and religion requires not so much that we should stop laughing to praise our Maker, as that we should praise -Him in our laughter; which we may do by laughing at the right time and place. For there is a time to laugh and a time to weep, a time to sing and a time to dance; all of which are equally good in their place, all equally |