This crew of patches, rude mechanicals,
     That work for bread upon Athenian stalls,

follows a sedentary trade, and he is accordingly represented as conceited, serious, and fantastical.  He is ready to undertake anything and everything, as if it was as much a matter of course as the motion of his loom and shuttle.  He is for playing the tyrant, the lover, the lady, the lion.  ’He will roar that it shall do any man’s heart good to hear him’; and this being objected to as improper, he still has a resource in his good opinion of himself, and ’will roar you an ‘twere any nightingale’.  Snug the Joiner is the moral man of the piece, who proceeds by measurement and discretion in all things.  You see him with his rule and compasses in his hand.  ’Have you the lion’s part written?  Pray you, if it be, give it me, for I am slow of study.’—­’You may do it extempore,’ says Quince, ‘for it is nothing but roaring.’  Starveling the Tailor keeps the peace, and objects to the lion and the drawn sword.  ’I believe we must leave the killing out when all’s done.’  Starveling, however, does not start the objections himself, but seconds them when made by others, as if he had not spirit to express his fears without encouragement.  It is too much to suppose all this intentional; but it very luckily falls out so.  Nature includes all that is implied in the most subtle analytical distinctions; and the same distinctions will be found in Shakespeare.  Bottom, who is not only chief actor, but stage-manager for the occasion, has a device to obviate the danger of frightening the ladies:  ’Write me a prologue, and let the prologue seem to say, we will do no harm with our swords, and that Pyramus is not killed indeed; and for better assurance, tell them that I, Pyramus, am not Pyramus, but Bottom the Weaver; this will put them out of fear.’  Bottom seems to have understood the subject of dramatic illusion at least as well as any modern essayist.  If our holiday mechanic rules the roast among his fellows, he is no less at home in his new character of an ass, ’with amiable cheeks, and fair large ears’.  He instinctively acquires a most learned taste, and grows fastidious in the choice of dried peas and bottled hay.  He is quite familiar with his new attendants, and assigns them their parts with all due gravity.  ’Monsieur Cobweb, good Monsieur, get your weapon in your hand, and kill me a red-hipt humble-bee on the top of a thistle, and, good Monsieur, bring me the honey-bag.’  What an exact knowledge is here shown of natural history!

Puck, or Robin Goodfellow, is the leader of the fairy band.  He is the Ariel of the MIDSUMMER’S night dream; and yet as unlike as can be to the Ariel in the tempest. No other poet could have made two such different characters out of the same fanciful materials and situations.  Ariel is a minister of retribution, who is touched with a sense of pity at the woes he inflicts.  Puck is a mad-cap sprite, full of wantonness and mischief,