It follows naturally from this that the Poet’s humour is widely diversified in its exhibitions.  There is indeed no part of him that acts with greater versatility.  It imparts a certain wholesome earnestness to his most sportive moods, making them like the honest and whole-hearted play of childhood, than which human life has nothing that proceeds more in earnest.  For who has not found it a property of childhood to be serious in its fun, innocent in its mischief, and ingenuous in its guile?  Moreover it is easy to remark that, in Shakespeare’s greatest dunces and simpletons and potentates of nonsense, there is something that prevents contempt.  A fellow-feeling springs up between us and them; it is through our sympathetic, not our selfish emotions, that they interest us:  we are far more inclined to laugh with them than at them; and even when we laugh at them we love them the more for that which is laughable in them.  So that our intercourse with them proceeds under the great law of kindness and charity.  Try this with any of the Poet’s illustrious groups of comic personages, and it will be found, I apprehend, thoroughly true.  What distinguishes us from them, or sets us above them in our own esteem, is never appealed to as a source or element of delectation.  And so the pleasure we have of them is altogether social in its nature, and humanizing in its effect, ever knitting more widely the bands of sympathy.

Here we have what may be called a foreground of comedy, but the Poet’s humour keeps up a living circulation between this and the serious elements of our being that stand behind it.  It is true, we are not always, nor perhaps often, conscious of any stirring in these latter:  what is laughable occupies the surface, and therefore is all that we directly see.  But still there are deep undercurrents of earnest sentiment moving not the less really that their movement is noiseless.  In the disguise of sport and mirth, there is a secret discipline of humanity going on; and the effect is all the better that it steals into us unseen and unsuspected:  we know that we laugh, but we do something better than laughing without knowing it, and so are made the better by our laughter; for in that which betters us without our knowledge we are doubly benefited.

Not indeed but that Shakespeare has characters, as, for example, the Steward in King Lear, which are thoroughly contemptible, and which we follow with contempt.  But it is to be observed that there is nothing laughable in Oswald; nothing that we can either laugh with or laugh at:  he is a sort of human reptile, such as life sometimes produces, whom we regard with moral loathing and disgust, but in whose company neither mirth nor pity can find any foothold.  On the other hand, the feelings moved by a Bottom, a Dogberry, an Aguecheek, or a Slender, are indeed very different from those which wait upon a Cordelia, an Ophelia, or an Imogen, but there is no essential oppugnance between them:  in both cases the heart moves by the laws of sympathy; which is exactly reversed in the case of such an object as Oswald:  the former all touch us through what we have in common with them; the latter touches us only through our antipathies.  There is, therefore, nothing either of comic or of tragic in the part of Oswald viewed by itself:  on the contrary, it runs in entire oppugnance to the proper currents of them both.