shut herself up in her palace, and will admit no kind of suit." In this perplexity, Viola remembers to have heard her father speak with praise and admiration of Orsino, the duke of the country; and having ascertained that he is not married, and that therefore his court is not a proper asylum for her in her feminine character, she attires herself in the disguise of a page, as the best protection against uncivil comments, till she can gain some tidings of her brother.

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If we carry our thoughts back to a romantic and chivalrous age, there is surely sufficient probability here for all the purposes of poetry. pursue the thread of Viola's destiny: she is engaged in the service of the duke, whom she finds "fancy sick" for the love of Olivia. We are left to infer, (for so it is hinted in the first scene,) that this duke, who with his accomplishments, and his personal attractions; his taste for music, his chivalrous tenderness, and his unrequited love, is really a very fascinating and poetical personage, though a little passionate and fantastic -had already made some impression on Viola's imagination; and when she comes to play the confidante, and to be loaded with favors and kindness in her assumed character, that she should be touched by a passion made up of pity, admiration, gratitude, and tenderness, does not, I think, in any way detract from the genuine sweetness and delicacy of her character, for “she never told her love."

Now all this, as the critic wisely observes, may not present a very just picture of life; and it may also fail to impart any moral lesson for the especial profit of well-bred young ladies; but is it not in truth and in nature? Did it ever fail to charm or to interest, to seize on the coldest fancy, to touch the most insensible heart?

Viola, then, is the chosen favorite of the enamored duke, and becomes his messenger to Olivia, and the interpre

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ter of his sufferings to that inaccessible beauty. In her character of a youthful page, she attracts the favor of Olivia, and excites the jealousy of her lord. The situation is critical and delicate; but how exquisitely is the character of Viola fitted to her part, carrying her through the ordeal with all the inward and spiritual grace of modesty! What beautiful propriety in the distinction drawn between Rosalind and Viola! The wild sweetness, the frolic humor, which sports free and unblamed amid the shades of Ardennes, would ill become Viola, whose playfulness is delica assumed as part of her disguise as a court-page, and is th guarded by the strictest delicacy. She has not like RosaRosa-2. lind, a saucy enjoyment in her own incognito; her disguise does not sit so easily upon her; her heart does not beat freely under it. As in the old ballad, where "Sweet William" is detected weeping in secret over her "man's array,"* so in Viola, a sweet consciousness of her feminine nature is for ever breaking through her masquerade :

And on her cheek is ready with a blush,

Modest as morning, when she coldly eyes

The youthful Phœbus.

She plays her part well, but never forgets nor allows us to forget, that she is playing a part.

Are you a comedian ?

OLIVIA.

VIOLA.

No, my profound heart! and yet by the very fangs of malice I swear, I am not that I play!

And thus she comments on it:

Disguise, I see thou art wickedness,

Wherein the pregnant enemy does much;

Percy's Reliques, vol. iii.—in the ballad of the "Lady turned

Serving Man."

How easy is it for the proper false

In women's waxen hearts to set their forms!
Alas! our frailty is the cause, not we.

The feminine cowardice of Viola, which will not allow her even to affect a courage becoming her attire,―her horror at the idea of drawing a sword, is very natural and characteristic; and produces a most humorous effect, even at the very moment it charms and interests us.

Contrasted with the deep, silent, patient love of Viola for the duke, we have the lady-like wilfulness of Olivia; and her sudden passion, or rather fancy, for the disguised page, takes so beautiful a coloring of poetry and sentiment, that we do not think her forward. Olivia is like a princess of romance, and has all the privileges of one; she is like Portia, high born and high bred, mistress over her servants, but not like Portia, "queen o'er herself." She has never in her life been opposed; the first contradiction, therefore, rouses all the woman in her, and turns a caprice into a headlong passion; yet she apologizes for herself:

I have said too much unto a heart of stone,
And laid mine honor to unchary out;
There is something in me that reproves my

But such a headstrong potent fault it is,
That it but mocks reproof!

fault;

And in the midst of her self-abandonment, never allows us to condemn, even while we pity her:

What shall you ask of me that I'll deny,

That honor, saved, may upon asking give?

The distance of rank which separates the countess from the youthful page-the real sex of Viola-the dignified elegance of Olivia's deportment, except where passion gets the better of her pride-her consistent coldness to

wards the duke-the description of that "smooth, discreet and stable bearing" with which she rules her householdher generous care for her steward Malvolio, in the midst of her own distress,—all these circumstances raise Olivia in our fancy, and render her caprice for the page a source of amusement and interest, not a subject of reproach. Twelfth Night is a genuine comedy;-a perpetual spring of the gayest and the sweetest fancies. In artificial society men and women are divided into castes and classes, and it is rarely that extremes in character or manners can approximate. To blend into one harmonious picture the utmost grace and refinement of sentiment, and the broadest effects of humor; the most poignant wit, and the most indulgent benignity;-in short, to bring before us in the same scene, Viola and Olivia, with Malvolio and Sir Toby, belonged only to Nature and to Shakspeare.

A woman's affections, however strong, are sentiments, when they run smooth; and become passions only when opposed.

In Juliet and Helena, love is depicted as a passion, properly so called; that is a natural impulse, throbbing in the heart's blood, and mingling with the very sources of life ;—a sentiment more or less modified by the imagination; a strong abiding principle and motive, excited by resistance, acting upon the will, animating all the other faculties, and again influenced by them. This is the most complex aspect of love, and in these two characters it is depicted in colors at once the most various, the most intense, and the most brilliant.

In Viola and Perdita, love, being less complex, appears more refined; more a sentiment than a passion—a compound of impulse and fancy, while the reflective powers and moral energies are more faintly developed. The same remark applies also to Julia and Silvia, in the two

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Gentlemen of Verona, and in a greater degree to Hermia and Helen in the Midsummer Night's Dream. In the two latter, though perfectly discriminated, love takes the visionary, fanciful cast, which belongs to the whole piece; it is scarcely a passion or a sentiment, but a dreamy enchantment, a reverie, which a fairy spell dissolves or rivets at pleasure.

But there was yet another possible modification of the sentiment, as combined with female nature; and this Shakspeare has shown to us. He has portrayed two beings in whom all intellectual and moral energy is in a manner latent, if existing; in whom love is an unconscious impulse, and imagination lends the external charm and hue, not the internal power; in whom the feminine character appears resolved into its very elementary principles-as modesty, grace,* tenderness. Without these, a woman, is no woman, but a thing which, luckily, wants a name yet; with these, though every other faculty were passive or deficient, she might still be herself. These are the inherent qualities with which God sent us into the world: they may be perverted by bad education-they may be obscured by harsh and evil destinies-they may be overpowered by the development of some particular mental power, the predominance of some passion; but they are never wholly crushed out of the woman's soul while it retains those faculties which render it reponsible to its Creator. Shakspeare then has shown us that these elemental feminine qualities, modesty, grace, tenderness, when expanded under genial

*By this word, as used here, i would be understood to mean that inexpressible something within the soul, which tends to the good, the beautiful, the true, and is the antipodes to the vulgar, the violent, and the false ;—that which we see diffused externally over the form and movements, where there is perfect innocence and unconsciousness as in children.