ure
about it, as if the Poet had purposely taken to such matter as he
could easily mould into graceful and entertaining forms; thus
exhibiting none of that crushing muscularity of mind to which the
hardest materials afterwards or elsewhere became as limber and pliant
as clay in the hands of a potter. Yet the play has a marked severity
of taste; the style, though by no means so great as in some others, is
singularly faultless; the graces of wit and poetry are distilled into
it with indescribable delicacy, as if they came from a hand at once
the most plentiful and the most sparing: in short, the work is
everywhere replete with "the modest charm of not too much"; its
beauty, like that of the heroine, being of the still, deep, retiring
sort, which it takes one long to find, forever to exhaust, and which
can be fully caught only by the reflective imagination in "the quiet
and still air of delightful studies." Thus all things are disposed in
most happy keeping with each other, and tempered in the blandest
proportion of Art; so as to illustrate how

"Grace, laughter, and discourse may meet,
And yet the beauty not go less;
For what is noble should be sweet."

If the characters of this play are generally less interesting in
themselves than some we meet with elsewhere in the Poet's works, the
defect is pretty well made up by the felicitous grouping of them.
Their very diversities of temper and purpose are made to act as so
many mutual affinities; and this too in a manner so spontaneous that
we see not how they could possibly act otherwise. For broad comic
effect, the cluster of which Sir Toby is the centre--all of them drawn
in clear yet delicate colours--is inferior only to the unparalleled
assemblage that makes rich the air of Eastcheap. Of Sir Toby
himself--that most whimsical, madcap, frolicsome old toper, so full of
antics and fond of sprees, with a plentiful stock of wit, which is
kept in motion by an equally plentiful lack of money--it is enough to
say, with our Mr. Verplanck, that "he certainly comes out of the same
associations where the Poet saw Falstaff hold his revels"; and that,
though "not Sir John, nor a fainter sketch of him, yet he has an odd
sort of a family likeness to him." Sir Toby has a decided _penchant_
for practical jokes; though rather because he takes a sort of
disinterested pleasure in them, than because he loves to see himself
in the process of engineering them through: for he has not a