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210 difficulty or trouble. Her shrewd, sharp sayings have only a pleasant piquancy for him. Indeed, however much weak colourless natures might stand in awe of eyes so quick to detect a flaw, and a wit so prompt to cover it with ridicule, there must have been a charm for him and for all manly natures in the very peril of coming under the fire of her raillery. A young, beautiful, graceful woman, flashing out brilliant sayings, charged with no real malice, but with just enough of a sting in them to pique the self-esteem of those at whom they are aimed, must always, I fancy, have a peculiar fascination for men of spirit. And so we see at the very outset it was with Beatrice. Not only her uncle, but also Don Pedro, and the Count Claudio, have the highest admiration of her. That she was either a vixen or a shrew was the last idea that would have entered their minds. "By my troth, a pleasant-spirited lady!" says Don Pedro; and the words express what was obviously the general impression of all who knew her best.

How long Benedick and Beatrice have known each other before the play begins is not indicated. I think we may fairly infer that their acquaintance is of some standing. It certainly did not begin when Don Pedro, Prince of Arragon, in passing through Messina, on the way probably to attack the Turks, with whom Spain, Austria, and Venice were at war about the period to which we may reasonably assign the action of the play, picked Benedick up, and attached him to his suite. They were obviously intimate before this. At all events, there had been time for an antagonism to spring up between them, which was natural where both were witty, and both accustomed to lord it somewhat, as witty people are apt to do, over their respective circles. Benedick could scarcely have failed to have drawn the fire of Beatrice by his avowed and contemptuous indifference to her sex, if by nothing else. To be evermore proclaiming, as we may be sure he did, just as much before he went to the wars as he did after his return, that he rated all women cheaply, was an offence which Beatrice, ready enough although she might be herself to make epigrams on the failings of her sex, was certain to resent. Was it to be borne that he should set himself up as "a professed tyrant to her whole sex," and boast his freedom from the vassalage to "love, the lord of all"? And this, too, when he had the effrontery to tell herself, "It is certain I am loved of all ladies, only you excepted."

It is true that Beatrice, when she is pressed upon the point, has much the same pronounced notions about the male sex, and the bondage of marriage. But she does not, like Benedick, go about proclaiming them to all comers; neither does she denounce the whole male sex for the faults or vices of the few. Besides, there has clearly been about Benedick, in these early days, an air of confident self-assertion, a tendency to talk people down, which have irritated Beatrice. The name, "Signor Montanto," borrowed from the language of the Italian fencing-school, by which she asks after him in the first sentence she utters, and her announcement that she had promised to "eat all of his killing," seem to point to the first of these faults. And may we not take, as an indication of the other, her first remark to himself, "I wonder you will still be talking, Signor Benedick; nobody marks you:" and also the sarcasm in her description of him to her uncle, as