eroism of the utterer--it is this conceit that saves _Bottom_
from a world of wonderment when he finds himself the leman dear, clipp'd
by the Queen of Faery. _Bottom_ takes the love--the doting of
_Titania_--as he would take the commanded honey-bag of the red-lipped
humble-bee--as something sweet and pleasant, but nought to rave about.
He is fortified by his conceit against any surprise of the most
bountiful fortune: self-opinion turns fairy treasures into rightful
wages. And are there not such _Bottoms_--not writ upon the paper Athens
of the poet; not swaggering in a wood watered of ink-drops--but such
sweet bullies in brick and mortar London--_Bottoms_ of Fortune, that for
sport's sake plays _Puck_? The ingenuous _Bottom_ of the play has this
distinction from the _Bottoms_ of the real, human world--he, for the
time, wears his ass's head with a difference; that is, he shows the
honest length of his ears, and does not, and cannot abate the show of a
single hair. His head is outwardly all ass: there is with him no
reservation soever.

MR. PHELPS has the fullest and the deepest sense of the asinine
qualities of _Bottom_ from the beginning. For _Bottom_ wants not the
ass's head to mark him ass: the ass is in _Bottom's_ blood and brain;
_Puck_ merely fixes the outward, vulgar type significant of the inward
creature. When _Bottom_ in the first scene desires to be _Wall_, and
_Moonshine_, and _Lion_, his conceit brays aloud, but brays with
undeveloped ears. But herein is the genius of our actor. The traditional
bully _Bottom_ is a dull, stupid, mouthing ass, with no force save in
his dullness. _Bottom_, as played by MR. PHELPS, is an ass with a
vehemence, a will, a vigour in his conceit, but still an ass. An ass
that fantastically kicks his heels to the right and left, but
still ass. An ass that has the most prolonged variations of his
utterance--nevertheless, it is braying, and nothing better. And there is
great variety in braying. We never heard two asses bray alike.
Listen--it may be the season of blossoming hawthorns--and asses salute
asses. In very different tones, with very different cadence, will every
ass make known the yearning, the aspiration that is within him. We speak
not frivolously, ignorantly, on this theme; for in our time we have
heard very many asses. And so return we to the _Bottom_ of merry
Islington--to the Golden Ass of Sadler's Wells.

That ass has opened the playhouse season of 1853-4 very musically-