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I am quite at a loss to conceive why Twelfth Night should ever have been referred to the Poet’s latest period of authorship.  The play naturally falls, by the internal notes of style, temper, and poetic grain, into the middle period of his productive years.  It has no such marks of vast but immature powers as are often met with in his earlier plays; nor, on the other hand, any of “that intense idiosyncrasy of thought and expression,—­that unparalleled fusion of the intellectual with the passionate,”—­which distinguishes his later ones.  Every thing is calm and quiet, with an air of unruffled serenity and composure 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