would laugh, yet perhaps with more courage and good-nature than
the laughers."

* * * * *

Ford's jealousy is managed with great skill so as to help on the plot,
bringing on a series of the richest incidents, and drawing the most
savoury issues from the mellow, juicy old sinner upon whom he is
practising. The means whereby he labours to justify his passion,
spreading temptations and then concerting surprises, are quite as
wicked as any thing Falstaff does, and have, besides, the further
crime of exceeding meanness; but both their meanness and their
wickedness are of the kind that rarely fail to be their own
punishment. The way in which his passion is made to sting and lash him
into reason, and the happy mischievousness of his wife in glutting his
disease, and thereby making an opportunity to show him what sort of
stuff it lives on, are admirable instances of the wisdom with which
the Poet underpins his most fantastic creations.

The counter-plottings, also, of Page and his wife, to sell their
daughter against her better sense, are about as far from virtue as the
worst purposes of Sir John; though, to be sure, their sins are of a
more respectable kind than to expose them to ridicule. But we are the
more willing to forget their unhandsome practices therein, because of
their good-natured efforts at last to make Falstaff forget his sad
miscarriages, and to compose, in a well-crowned cup of social
merriment, whatever vexations and disquietudes still remain.--Anne
Page is but an average specimen of discreet, placid, innocent
mediocrity, yet with a mind of her own, in whom we can feel no such
interest as a rich father causes to be felt by those about her. In her
and Fenton a slight dash of romance is given to the play; their love
forming a barely audible undertone of poetry in the chorus of
comicalities, as if on purpose that while the sides are shaken the
heart may not be left altogether untouched.

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING.

Much Ado about Nothing, together with _As You Like It, King Henry the
Fifth_, and Ben Jonson's _Every Man in his Humour_, was registered in
the Stationers' books August 4, 1600; all with a caveat "to be
stayed." Why the plays were thus locked up from the press by an
injunction, does not appear; perhaps to keep the right of publishing
them in the hands of those who made the entry. _Much Ado about
Nothing_ was entered again on the 23d of the same month, and was
issued