fellow than a wise man; and yet he is wise beyond either his fortune or education."[1] It is certain, then, that, behaving like a fool in some things, he looked very like a fool in others.
Is it not a remarkable coincidence, that both his supposed dramatic counterparts have the same peculiarity? When Armado tells the "country lass" he is wooing, that he will "tell her wonders," she exclaims,—"skittish female" that she is,—"What, with that face?" And when Holofernes, nettled with the ridicule showered on his abortive impersonation of Judas Maccabaeus, says, "I will not be put out of countenance,"—Byron replies, "Because thou hast no face." The indignant pedant justifies, and, pointing to his physiognomy, inquires, "What is this?" Whereupon the waggish courtiers proceed to define it: it is "a cittern-head," "the head of a bodkin," "a death's-face in a ring," "the face of an old Roman coin, scarce seen," and so forth.
The satire here embodied is of a nature too personal to be considered the mere work of a riotous fancy. It is a trait individualizing and particularising the person at whom the more general satire is aimed; and, coupled with the infirmities of the victim's moral nature, it fastens upon poor Florio identity with "the brace of coxcombs." Such satire may be censured as ungenerous; we cannot help that,—litera scripta manet,—and we cannot rail the seal from the bond. Such attacks were the general, if not universal, practice of the age in which Shakspeare flourished; and we have no right to blame him for not being as far in advance of his age, morally, as he was intellectually. A notorious instance of a personal attack under various characters in one play is to be found in Ben Jonson's "Bartholomew Fair," wherein he boasts of having, under the characters of Lanthorn, Leatherhead, the Puppet-showman, and Adam Overdo, satirized the celebrated Inigo Jones,—
"By all his titles and whole style at once
Of tireman, montebank, and Justice Jones."
It was probably to confront and outface "Aristophanes and his comedians," and to "abrogate the scurrility" of the "sea-dogs" and "land-critics," that our Resolute lexicographer prefixed to the Enlarged Edition of his Dictionary and to his translation of Montaigne, his portrait or effigies, engraved by Hole. This portrait would, to a person unapprised of any peculiarity in the original, present apparently little or nothing to justify the remark of Cornwallis. But making due allowance for the address, if not the flattery, of a skilful painter, it were hardly possible for the observer, aware of the blemish, not to detect in the short and close-curled fell of hair, the wild, staring eyes, the contour of the visage,—which, expanding from the narrow and wrinkled forehead into cheek-bones of more than Scottish amplitude, suddenly contracts to a pointed chin, rendered still more acute by a short, peaked beard, —not to detect in this lozenge-shaped visnomy and its air, at once haggard and grotesque, traits that not only bear out the remark of his pupil, but the raillery also of the court wits in Shakespeare's dramatic satire.
Whatever happiness Rose Daniel may have had in the domestic virtues of her lord, his relations with the world, his temper, eccentricities, and personal appearance could have given her little. That he was an attached and affectionate husband his last will and testament gives touching post-mortem evidence.
Let us return to the fortunes of the faithless Rosalinde. It appears she married Menalcas,—the treacherous friend and rival of the "passionate shepherd." Who, then, was Menalcas? or why was this name specially selected by our poet to designate the man he disliked?
The pastoral name Menalcas is obviously and pointedly enough adopted from the Eclogues of Virgil; in which, by comparing the fifteenth line of the second with the sixty-sixth of the third, we shall find he was the rival who (to use
- ↑ Cornwallis's Essays, p.99.
