Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 137.djvu/218

212 caught the Benedick, it will cost him a thousand pound ere he be cured.

Mess. I will hold friends with you, lady.

Beat. Do, good friend.

Leon. You'll ne'er run mad, niece.

Beat. No, not till a hot January."

At this point Don Pedro enters with his suite, and Benedick among them. It is not long before he draws upon himself, and deservedly too, a shaft from the quiver of Beatrice's wit. When Don Pedro, turning to Hero, says, "I think this is your daughter," and Leonato rejoins, "Her mother hath many times told me so," Benedick strikes in with the somewhat impertinent freedom of a privileged jester, "Were you in doubt, Signor, that you asked her?" Leonato retorts upon him, "Signor Benedick, no; for then were you a child." "You have it full, Benedick," exclaims Don Pedro; "we may guess by this what you are, being a man," – adding, "Truly, the lady father's herself; be happy, lady! for you are like an honourable father." Benedick, a little stung by Leonato's repartee, now grows rude. "If Signor Leonato," he says, "be her father, she would not have his head on her shoulders for all Messina, as like him as she is." The others turn away to converse, but Beatrice, indignant at what she considers his impertinent speech to her uncle, addresses him tauntingly with –

"I wonder you will still be talking, Signor Benedick; nobody marks you.

Bene. What, my dear Lady Disdain! are you yet living?

Beat. Is it possible disdain should die, while she hath such meet food to feed it as Signor Benedick? Courtesy itself must convert to disdain if you come in her presence."

In the dialogue which ensues, Benedick falls at once into his old habit of boasting that women love him, but that he does not love them. In what he says, he is unmannerly rather than witty; and finding very soon that he has the worst of the encounter, he is glad to break off the interview, telling Beatrice, "I would my horse had the speed of your tongue, and so good a continuer. But keep your way, o' God's name; I have done." She is ready with her retort – "You always end with a jade's trick; I know you of old."

When Beatrice leaves the scene, and Benedick remains behind with Claudio, he can give full vent to his disparagement of all womankind with no fear of rebuke. In vain does Claudio try to extract from him some encouragement in his admiration of Leonato's daughter Hero. "In mine eye," says Claudio, "she is the sweetest lady ever I looked on." But Benedick can "see no such matter." Then it is he drops out the acknowledgment, that Beatrice excels her cousin in beauty as "the first of May doth the last of December," if only she were not "possessed