room for laughter! if an unseasonable reflection
of morality obtruded itself, it was a deep sense of the pitiable
infirmity of man's nature, that can lay him open to such frenzies--but
in truth you rather admired than pitied the lunacy while it
lasted--you felt that an hour of such mistake was worth an age with
the eyes open. Who would not wish to live but for a day in the conceit
of such a lady's love as Olivia? Why, the Duke would have given his
principality but for a quarter of a minute, sleeping or waking, to
have been so deluded. The man seemed to tread upon air, to taste
manna, to walk with his head in the clouds, to mate Hyperion. O! shake
not the castles of his pride--endure yet for a season bright moments
of confidence--"stand still ye watches of the element," that Malvolio
may be still in fancy fair Olivia's lord--but fate and retribution say
no--I hear the mischievous titter of Maria--the witty taunts of Sir
Toby--the still more insupportable triumph of the foolish knight--the
counterfeit Sir Topas is unmasked--and "thus the whirligig of time,"
as the true clown hath it, "brings in his revenges." I confess that I
never saw the catastrophe of this character, while Bensley played it,
without a kind of tragic interest. There was good foolery too. Few now
remember Dodd. What an Aguecheek the stage lost in him! Lovegrove, who
came nearest to the old actors, revived the character some few seasons
ago, and made it sufficiently grotesque; but Dodd was _it_, as it
came out of Nature's hands. It might be said to remain _in puris
naturalibus_. In expressing slowness of apprehension this actor
surpassed all others. You could see the first dawn of an idea stealing
slowly over his countenance, climbing up by little and little, with
a painful process, till it cleared up at last to the fulness of a
twilight conception--its highest meridian. He seemed to keep back
his intellect, as some have had the power to retard their pulsation.
The balloon takes less time in filling, than it took to cover
the expansion of his broad moony face over all its quarters with
expression. A glimmer of understanding would appear in a corner of his
eye, and for lack of fuel go out again. A part of his forehead would
catch a little intelligence, and be a long time in communicating it to
the remainder.

I am ill at dates, but I think it is now better than five and twenty
years ago that walking in the gardens of Gray's Inn--they were then
far finer