it dwells, of the earth earthy, into the fresh air and sunshine, making Innocence herself the teller of the love dreams of the young.

Shakespeare's treatment of the tale gives us the comedy-as Romeo and Juliet was the tragedy— of love's young dream. The play was named perhaps from the whimsical drawings of partners that were a part of Twelfth Night sport, and from the association of that time with the acting of light-hearted masques and plays. The twelfth night after Christmas ended with special jollity the twelve days of the Christmas festival. Choosing of kings and queens on on that day by lot is said to have been a way of commemorating the homage of the three kings who, guided by the star, came on the twelfth day to the infant Jesus.

Twelfth Night, in Shakespeare, is a masque of love with comedy cross-purposes arising from confusion of partners. It is alive with song and jest. Shakespeare's age was about thirty-seven when he wrote it. It was written not very long after the Merchant of Venice; and Hamlet was,

18

after Twelfth Night, possibly the next play that

Shakespeare wrote.

While all that was gross in old forms of the tale of brother and sister disappears in Shakespeare's treatment of it, the ideal of young love has its finer life brought out by contrast with the doings This use of contrast of Sir Toby and his friends. is akin to the artistic heightening of our sense of the ideal in the Midsummer Night's Dream, by using as a foil to the bright fancy that plays through the fairy scenes the comic dulness of Nic Bottom and his friends.

In a city of Illyria there is a young Duke Orsino inspired by nature with sweet yearnings after love. He is in the position of young Romeo enamoured of fair Rosaline, when Nature begets a desire and chance that determines Rosaline as the first object may transfer it to a Juliet, but the yearning itself lies in the fine spirit of youth that no chance of outward fortune can destroy. The First Act of Twelfth Night opens to soft music with suggestion of this, in lines full

of the delicious

"If music be the food of love, play on:
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,

The appetite may sicken and so die.
That strain again;-it had a dying fall:
O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing, and giving odour."

Pope, in his edition of Shakespeare, altered in this passage "sound" to "south," and the change has been generally accepted. It has a vague prettiness, but the rustle of the summer breeze over the crisp leaves and blossoms of a bank of violets, stealing and giving odour, is an image more clearly presented to the mind when the word is left as, I believe, Shakespeare wrote it.

The fitful and swift movements of love fancy are expressed in the next lines:—

Enough; no more:

'Tis not so sweet now as it was before.

O, spirit of love, how quick and fresh art thou,

That notwithstanding thy capacity

Receiveth as the sea, nought enters there,

Of what validity and pitch soe'er,

But falls into abatement and low price,

Even in a minute! So full of shapes is fancy,

That it alone is high-fantastical."

The first lines having thus struck the keynote of the play, a short dialogue begins the story. Near to the duke's palace is the house of a rich maiden, daughter of a count who has been twelve months dead. Her brother, who had succeeded to his father's large possessions, has also died, and she inherits all. She pleads long mourning for her brother against the duke's suit for her love.

There is set over her great household a stately steward, who is capable and faithful, only ridiculous through his self-love.

There is in her household Feste, her father's fool, a skilled musician.

As sons of gentlemen wore great lord's liveries, so this great lady has in the service of her chamber a maid, Maria, well enough educated to have a handwriting like her own, well enough dressed to make it doubtful to Viola, when first seeing Olivia and Maria together, which is the lady of

A greedy uncle, who would live jovially at other folks' expense, Sir Toby Belch, has quartered himself upon his young niece, and has invited to share his corner in the great house a rich dull-witted knight, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, whom he brings in as his niece's wooer, and so means to gull out of a substantial part of his income of three thousand ducats a year. We learn, indeed, that he has got possession of two thousand of his friend's ducats before the year is out. Thus Sir Toby keeps his own money untouched, draws a good income from Sir Andrew, and lives riotously at his niece's cost.

A well-to-do knight, who is so jovial and so thrifty withal, is, in Maria's eyes, worth catching for a husband. She is angling for him, and will catch him. There is no young dream in her love: Sir Toby and Maria pair with a love that is not, like the duke's, " more noble than the world," it does prize "quantity of dirty lands."

The play is a tale of two households-Olivia's and Orsino's as they are affected by the coming of the brother and sister who seem doubles of each other. The time of action of the play is three