and as grossly out of place as is any but a tragic end to the action of Measure for Measure.  As for Beatrice, she is as perfect a lady, though of a far different age and breeding, as Celimene or Millamant; and a decidedly more perfect woman than could properly or permissibly have trod the stage of Congreve or Moliere.  She would have disarranged all the dramatic proprieties and harmonies of the one great school of pure comedy.  The good fierce outbreak of her high true heart in two swift words—­“Kill Claudio” {154}—­would have fluttered the dovecotes of fashionable drama to some purpose.  But Alceste would have taken her to his own.

No quainter and apter example was ever given of many men’s absolute inability to see the plainest aims, to learn the simplest rudiments, to appreciate the most practical requisites of art, whether applied to theatrical action or to any other as evident as exalted aim, than the instance afforded by that criticism of time past which sagaciously remarked that “any less amusingly absurd” constables than Dogberry and Verges would have filled their parts in the action of the play equally well.  Our own day has doubtless brought forth critics and students of else unparalleled capacity for the task of laying wind-eggs in mare’s nests, and wasting all the warmth of their brains and tongues in the hopeful endeavour to hatch them:  but so fine a specimen was never dropped yet as this of the plumed or plumeless biped who discovered that if Dogberry had not been Dogberry and Verges had not been Verges they would have been equally unsuccessful in their honest attempt to warn Leonato betimes of the plot against his daughter’s honour.  The only explanation of the mistake is this; and it is one of which the force will be intelligible only to those who are acquainted with the very singular physiology of that remarkably prolific animal known to critical science as the Shakespearean scholiast:  that if Dogberry had been other than Dogberry, or if Verges had been other than Verges, the action and catastrophe of the whole play could never have taken place at all.

All true Pantagruelians will always, or at least as long as may be permitted by the Society for the Suppression of Vice, cherish with an especial regard the comedy in which Shakespeare also has shown himself as surely the loving as he would surely have been the beloved disciple of that insuppressible divine, the immortal and most reverend vicar of Meudon.  Two only among the mighty men who lived and wrote and died within the century which gave birth to Shakespeare were found worthy of so great an honour at his hands as the double homage of citation and imitation:  and these two, naturally and properly enough, were Francois Rabelais and Christopher Marlowe.  We cannot but recognise on what far travels in what good company “Feste the jester” had but lately been, on that night of “very gracious fooling” when he was pleased to enlighten the unforgetful mind