ur own day has doubtless brought forth critics and students of
else unparalleled capacity for the task of laying wind-eggs in mare's
nests, and wasting all the warmth of their brains and tongues in the
hopeful endeavour to hatch them: but so fine a specimen was never dropped
yet as this of the plumed or plumeless biped who discovered that if
Dogberry had not been Dogberry and Verges had not been Verges they would
have been equally unsuccessful in their honest attempt to warn Leonato
betimes of the plot against his daughter's honour. The only explanation
of the mistake is this; and it is one of which the force will be
intelligible only to those who are acquainted with the very singular
physiology of that remarkably prolific animal known to critical science
as the Shakespearean scholiast: that if Dogberry had been other than
Dogberry, or if Verges had been other than Verges, the action and
catastrophe of the whole play could never have taken place at all.

All true Pantagruelians will always, or at least as long as may be
permitted by the Society for the Suppression of Vice, cherish with an
especial regard the comedy in which Shakespeare also has shown himself as
surely the loving as he would surely have been the beloved disciple of
that insuppressible divine, the immortal and most reverend vicar of
Meudon. Two only among the mighty men who lived and wrote and died
within the century which gave birth to Shakespeare were found worthy of
so great an honour at his hands as the double homage of citation and
imitation: and these two, naturally and properly enough, were Francois
Rabelais and Christopher Marlowe. We cannot but recognise on what far
travels in what good company "Feste the jester" had but lately been, on
that night of "very gracious fooling" when he was pleased to enlighten
the unforgetful mind of Sir Andrew as to the history of Pigrogromitus,
and of the Vapians passing the equinoctial of Queubus. At what precise
degree of latitude and longitude between the blessed islands of Medamothy
and Papimania this equinoctial may intersect the Sporades of the outer
ocean, is a problem on the solution of which the energy of those many
modern sons of Aguecheek who have undertaken the task of writing about
and about the text and the history of Shakespeare might be expended with
an unusually reasonable hope and expectation of arriving at an
exceptionally profitable end.

Even apart from their sunny identity of spirit and br