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 in quarto in the course of that year, with “as it hath been sundry times publicly acted” in the title-page; which would naturally infer the play to have been written in 1599, or in the early part of 1600.  All the internal marks of style and temper bear in favour of the same date; as in these respects it is hardly distinguishable from As You Like It.  It has also been ascertained from Vertue’s manuscripts, that in May, 1613, John Heminge the actor, and the Poet’s friend, received L40, besides a gratuity of L20 from the King, for presenting six plays at Hampton Court, Much Ado about Nothing being one of them.

After the one quarto of 1600, the play is not met with again till it reappeared in the folio of 1623.  Some question has been made whether the folio was a reprint of the quarto, or from another manuscript.  Considerable might be urged on either side; but the arguments would hardly pay the stating; the differences of the two copies being so few and slight as to make the question a thing of little consequence.  The best editors generally agree in thinking the quarto the better authority of the two.  Remains but to add that, with the two original copies, the text of the play is so clear and well-settled as almost to foreclose controversy.