it also, with choice
illustrations of both wit and humour; a laughter, often exquisite,
ringing, if faintly, yet as genuine laughter still, though sometimes
sinking into mere burlesque, which has not lasted quite so well. And
Shakespeare [162] brings a serious effect out of the trifling of his
characters. A dainty love-making is interchanged with the more
cumbrous play: below the many artifices of Biron's amorous speeches we
may trace sometimes the "unutterable longing;" and the lines in which
Katherine describes the blighting through love of her younger sister
are one of the most touching things in older literature.* Again, how
many echoes seem awakened by those strange words, actually said in
jest! "The sweet war-man (Hector of Troy) is dead and rotten; sweet
chucks, beat not the bones of the buried: when he breathed, he was a
man!"--words which may remind us of Shakespeare's own epitaph. In the
last scene, an ingenious turn is given to the action, so that the piece
does not conclude after the manner of other comedies.--

Our wooing doth not end like an old play;
Jack hath not Jill:

and Shakespeare strikes a passionate note across it at last, in the
entrance of the messenger, who announces to the princess that the king
her father is suddenly dead.

The merely dramatic interest of the piece is slight enough; only just
sufficient, indeed, to form the vehicle of its wit and poetry. The
scene--a park of the King of Navarre--is unaltered throughout; and the
unity of the [163] play is not so much the unity of a drama as that of
a series of pictorial groups, in which the same figures reappear, in
different combinations but on the same background. It is as if
Shakespeare had intended to bind together, by some inventive conceit,
the devices of an ancient tapestry, and give voices to its figures. On
one side, a fair palace; on the other, the tents of the Princess of
France, who has come on an embassy from her father to the King of
Navarre; in the midst, a wide space of smooth grass.

The same personages are combined over and over again into a series of
gallant scenes--the princess, the three masked ladies, the quaint,
pedantic king; one of those amiable kings men have never loved enough,
whose serious occupation with the things of the mind seems, by contrast
with the more usual forms of kingship, like frivolity or play. Some of
the figures are grotesque merely, and all the male ones at least, a
little fantast