f,--than one of our modern dandies is
like Sir Philip Sydney.

In Beatrice, Shakspeare has contrived that the poetry of the character
shall not only soften, but heighten its comic effect. We are not only
inclined to forgive Beatrice all her scornful airs, all her biting
jests, all her assumption of superiority; but they amuse and delight us
the more, when we find her, with all the headlong simplicity of a child,
falling at once into the snare laid for her affections; when we see
_her_, who thought a man of God's making not good enough for her, who
disdained to be o'ermastered by "a piece of valiant dust," stooping like
the rest of her sex, vailing her proud spirit, and taming her wild heart
to the loving hand of him whom she had scorned, flouted, and misused,
"past the endurance of a block." And we are yet more completely won by
her generous enthusiastic attachment to her cousin. When the father of
Hero believes the tale of her guilt; when Claudio, her lover, without
remorse or a lingering doubt, consigns her to shame; when the Friar
remains silent, and the generous Benedick himself knows not what to say,
Beatrice, confident in her affections, and guided only by the impulses
of her own feminine heart, sees through the inconsistency, the
impossibility of the charge, and exclaims, without a moment's
hesitation,

O, on my soul, my cousin is belied!

Schlegel, in his remarks on the play of "Much Ado about nothing," has
given us an amusing instance of that sense of reality with which we are
impressed by Shakspeare's characters. He says of Benedick and Beatrice,
as if he had known them personally, that the exclusive direction of
their pointed raillery against each other "is a proof of a growing
inclination." This is not unlikely; and the same inference would lead us
to suppose that this mutual inclination had commenced before the opening
of the play. The very first words uttered by Beatrice are an inquiry
after Benedick, though expressed with her usual arch impertinence:--

I pray you, is Signior Montanto returned from the wars, or
no?

I pray you, how many hath he killed and eaten in these wars?
But how many hath he killed? for indeed I promised to eat
all of his killing.

And in the unprovoked hostility with which she falls upon him in his
absence, in the pertinacity and bitterness of her satire, there is
certainly great argument that he occupies much more of her thoughts than
she would