The shrewd, mirth-loving Fabian, who in greedy silence devours up fun, tasting it too far down towards his knees to give any audible sign of the satisfaction it yields him, is an apt and willing agent in putting the stratagem through.  If he does nothing towards inventing or cooking up the repast, he is at least a happy and genial partaker of the banquet that others have prepared.—­Feste, the jester, completes this illustrious group of laughing and laughter-moving personages.  Though not, perhaps, quite so wise a fellow as Touchstone, of As-You-Like-It memory, nor endowed with so fluent and racy a fund of humour, he nevertheless has enough of both to meet all the demands of his situation.  If, on the one hand, he never launches the ball of fun, neither, on the other, does he ever fail to do his part towards keeping it rolling.  On the whole, he has a sufficiently facile and apposite gift at jesting out philosophy, and moralizing the scenes where he moves; and whatever he has in that line is perfectly original with him.  It strikes me, withal, as a rather note-worthy circumstance that both the comedy and the romance of the play meet together in him, as in their natural home.  He is indeed a right jolly fellow; no note of mirth springs up but he has answering susceptibilities for it to light upon; but he also has at the same time a delicate vein of tender pathos in him; as appears by the touchingly-plaintive song he sings, which, by the way, is one of

    “The very sweetest Fancy culls or frames,
    Where tenderness of heart is strong and deep.”

I am not supposing this to be the measure of his lyrical invention, for the song probably is not of his making; but the selection marks at least the setting of his taste, or rather the tuning of his soul, and thus discovers a choice reserve of feeling laid up in his breast.

* * * * *

Such are the scenes, such the characters that enliven Olivia’s mansion during the play:  Olivia herself, calm, cheerful, of “smooth, discreet, and stable bearing,” hovering about them; sometimes unbending, never losing her dignity among them; often checking, oftener enjoying their merry-makings, and occasionally emerging from her seclusion to be plagued by the Duke’s message and bewitched by his messenger:  and Viola, always perfect in her part, yet always shrinking from it, appearing among them from time to time on her embassies of love; sometimes a partaker, sometimes a provoker, sometimes the victim of their mischievous sport.

All this array of comicalities, exhilarating as it is in itself, is rendered doubly so by the frequent changes and playings-in of poetry breathed from the sweetest spots of romance, and which “gives a very echo to the seat where Love is thron’d”; ideas and images of beauty creeping and stealing over the mind with footsteps so soft and delicate that we scarce know what touches us,—­the motions of one that had learned to tread