e at pleasure. Even
the heroic personages are fitly shown in an unheroic aspect: we see
them but in their unbendings, when they have daffed their martial
robes aside, to lead the train of day-dreamers, and have a nuptial
jubilee. In their case, great care and art were required, to make the
play what it has been blamed for being; that is, to keep the dramatic
sufficiently under, and lest the law of a part should override the law
of the whole.

So, likewise, in the transformation of Bottom and the dotage of
Titania, all the resources of fancy were needed, to prevent the
unpoetical from getting the upper hand, and thus swamping the genius
of the piece. As it is, what words can fitly express the effect with
which the extremes of the grotesque and the beautiful are here brought
together? What an inward quiet laughter springs up and lubricates the
fancy at Bottom's droll confusion of his two natures, when he talks,
now as an ass, now as a man, and anon as a mixture of both; his
thoughts running at the same time on honey-bags and thistles, the
charms of music and of good dry oats! Who but Shakespeare or Nature
could have so interfused the lyrical spirit, not only with, but into
and through a series or cluster of the most irregular and fantastic
drolleries? But indeed this embracing and kissing of the most
ludicrous and the most poetical, the enchantment under which they
meet, and the airy, dream-like grace that hovers over their union, are
altogether inimitable and indescribable. In this singular wedlock, the
very diversity of the elements seems to link them the closer, while
this linking in turn heightens that diversity; Titania being thereby
drawn on to finer issues of soul, and Bottom to larger expressions of
stomach. The union is so very improbable as to seem quite natural: we
cannot conceive how any thing but a dream could possibly have married
things so contrary; and that they could not have come together save in
a dream, is a sort of proof that they _were_ dreamed together.

And so, throughout, the execution is in strict accordance with the
plan. The play, from beginning to end, is a perfect festival of
whatever dainties and delicacies poetry may command,--a continued
revelry and jollification of soul, where the understanding is lulled
asleep, that the fancy may run riot in unrestrained enjoyment. The
bringing together of four parts so dissimilar as those of the Duke and
his warrior Bride, of the Athenian ladies and t