“As if the wind, not he, did walk,
    Nor press’d a flower, nor bow’d a stalk.”

Upon this portion of the play Hazlitt has some spirited remarks:  “We have a friendship for Sir Toby; we patronize Sir Andrew; we have an understanding with the Clown, a sneaking kindness for Maria and her rogueries; we feel a regard for Malvolio, and sympathize with his gravity, his smiles, his cross-garters, his yellow stockings, and imprisonment:  but there is something that excites in us a stronger feeling than all this.”

* * * * *

Olivia is a considerable instance how much a fair and candid setting-forth may do to render an ordinary person attractive, and shows that for the homebred comforts and fireside tenour of life such persons after all are apt to be the best.  Nor, though something commonplace in her make-up, such as the average of cultivated womanhood is always found to be, is she without bright and penetrative thoughts, whenever the occasion calls for them.  Her reply to the Steward, when, by way of scorching the Clown, he “marvels that her ladyship takes delight in such a barren rascal,” gives the true texture of her mind and moral frame:  “O, you are sick of self-love, Malvolio, and taste with a distempered appetite.  To be generous, guiltless, and of free disposition, is to take those things for bird-bolts that you deem cannon-bullets.  There is no slander in an allowed Fool, though he do nothing but rail; nor no railing in a known discreet man, though he do nothing but reprove.”  Practical wisdom enough to make the course of any household run smooth!  The instincts of a happy, placid temper have taught Olivia that there is as little of Christian virtue as of natural benignity in stinging away the spirit of kindness with a tongue of acid and acrimonious pietism.  Her firm and healthy pulse beats in sympathy with the sportiveness in which the proper decorum of her station may not permit her to bear an active part.  And she is too considerate, withal, not to look with indulgence on the pleasantries that are partly meant to divert her thoughts, and air off a too vivid remembrance of her recent sorrows.  Besides, she has gathered, even under the discipline of her own afflictions, that as, on the one hand, “what Nature makes us mourn she bids us heal,” so, on the other, the free hilarities of wit and humour, even though there be something of nonsense mixed up with them, are a part of that “bland philosophy of life” which helps to knit us up in the unions of charity and peace; that they promote cheerfulness of temper, smooth down the lines of care, sweeten away the asperities of the mind, make the eye sparkling and lustrous; and, in short, do much of the very best stitching in the embroidered web of friendship and fair society.  So that she finds abundant motive in reason, with no impediment in religion, to refrain from spoiling the merry passages of her friends and servants by looking black or sour upon them.