Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 137.djvu/232

226 to express! What pretty sarcasms and humorous sadness! – quite impossible to explain in words: –

"Bene. And, I pray thee now, tell me for which of my bad parts didst thou first fall in love with me?

Beat. For them all together; which maintained so politic a state of evil that they will not admit any good part to intermingle with them. But for which of my good parts did you first suffer love for me?

Bene. 'Suffer love'? A good epithet! I do suffer love, indeed, for I love thee against my will.

Beat. In spite of your heart, I think. Alas, poor heart! If you spite it for my sake, I will spite it for yours; for I will never love that which my friend hates. ...

Bene. And now tell me, how doth your cousin?

Beat. Very ill.

Bene. And how do you?

Beat. Very ill too.

Bene. Serve God, love me, and mend! There will I leave you too, for here comes one in haste."

This is Ursula with the tidings that the plot against Hero has been unmasked, "the Prince and Claudio mightily abused, and Don John, the author of all, fled and gone." "Will you go hear this news, signor?" says Beatrice. His rejoinder shows him all the happy lover. "I will live in thy heart, die in thy lap, and be buried in thine eyes; and, moreover, I will go with thee to thy uncle's." How quaintly comes in the "moreover" here!

When we see them again, they are with Leonato, Hero, and the others, who are met to receive Don Pedro and Claudio, and to seal the reconciliation which has been arranged by the marriage of Claudio with the lady whom he believes to be Hero's cousin. Marriage being in the air, Benedick has decided that the good friar shall have double duty to perform on the occasion. Leonato's consent to his wedding

Beatrice is granted freely; and in giving it he bewilders Benedick by obscure references to the plot for bringing the two together. Before an explanation can be given, the Prince and Claudio arrive. Although well pleased that he is no longer required to call his old friend to account, Benedick takes care to show, by his coldness and reserve, that he considers them to have behaved badly, even had the story been true which Don John had beguiled them into believing. When the Prince rallies him about his "February face," he makes no rejoinder. But when Claudio, with infinite bad taste, at a moment when his mind should have been full of the gravest thoughts, attacks him in the same spirit, Benedick turns upon him with caustic severity. The entrance of Hero with her ladies masked arrests what might have grown into hot words. Hero is given to Claudio, and accepts him with a ready forgiveness, which I feel very sure, under similar circumstances, Beatrice's self-respect would not have permitted her to grant. Such treatment as Claudio's would have chilled all love within her. She would never have trusted as her husband the man who had allowed himself to be so easily deceived, and who had once openly shamed her before the world. Hero, altogether a feebler nature, neither looks so far into the future, nor feels so intensely what has happened in the past. But, to my thinking, her prospects of lasting happiness with the credulous and vacillating Claudio are somewhat doubtful.

I have no misgivings about the future happiness of Benedick and Beatrice, even although they learn how they have been misled into thinking that each was dying for the other, and up to the moment of going to the altar keep up their