wit broken on me, because I have rail’d so long against marriage:  but doth not the appetite alter?  A man loves the meat in his youth, that he cannot endure in his age.—­Shall quips, and sentences, and these paper bullets of the brain, awe a man from the career of his humour?  No:  the world must be peopled.  When I said, I would die a bachelor, I did not think I should live till I were marry’d.—­Here comes Beatrice; by this day, she’s a fair lady:  I do spy some marks of love in her.

The beauty of all this arises from the characters of the persons so entrapped.  Benedick is a professed and staunch enemy to marriage, and gives very plausible reasons for the faith that is in him.  And as to Beatrice, she persecutes him all day with her jests (so that he could hardly think of being troubled with them at night), she not only turns him but all other things into jest, and is proof against everything serious.

   Hero.  Disdain and scorn ride sparkling in her eyes,
     Misprising what they look on; and her wit
     Values itself so highly, that to her
     All matter else seems weak:  she cannot love,
     Nor take no shape nor project of affection,
     She is so self-endeared.

   Ursula.  Sure, I think so;
     And therefore, certainly, it were not good
     She knew his love, lest she make sport at it.

   Hero.  Why, you speak truth:  I never yet saw man,
     How wise, how noble, young, how rarely featur’d,
     But she would spell him backward:  if fair-fac’d,
     She’d swear the gentleman should be her sister;
     If black, why, nature, drawing of an antick,
     Made a foul blot:  if tall, a lance ill-headed;
     If low, an agate very vilely cut: 
     If speaking, why, a vane blown with all winds;
     If silent, why, a block moved with none. 
     So turns she every man the wrong side out;
     And never gives to truth and virtue that
     Which simpleness and merit purchaseth.

These were happy materials for Shakespeare to work on, and he has made a happy use of them.  Perhaps that middle point of comedy was never more nicely hit in which the ludicrous blends with the tender, and our follies, turning round against themselves in support of our affections, retain nothing but their humanity.

Dogberry and Verges in this play are inimitable specimens of quaint blundering and misprisions of meaning; and are a standing record of that formal gravity of pretension and total want of common understanding, which Shakespeare no doubt copied from real life, and which in the course of two hundred years appear to have ascended from the lowest to the highest offices in the state.

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