Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/116

 good-tempered, and the first tap of flattery cracks his whole pretension; so that the crafty Quince manages to cast him for Pyramus, who was just such another sweet-faced and destructive lady's man.

Dogberry's malapropisms are inflations made by his vanity to float him into an appearance of sagacity, donkeys' hides blown up to take him across the stream of intercourse. But Bottom miscalls his words from sheer rusticity, and not from any effort to borrow the language of his superiors. The word "alleviate" which he has sometimes heard has been dribbling from brain-cell to cell, and so struggles unconsciously into "aggravate" at last. He uses genteel words which have stayed out of town so long as to be countrified; he has not picked them up, but they have blown into his mind and lodged there, like mallow-seeds. So we see that he is in most senses a born natural, proprietor by birth of the crest which at last he wears. But he is not all fool, for when he wakes out of his exposition of sleep and says he has had a dream, we notice that he is reluctant to expound it. He begins, "Methought I was,"—but a feeling of self-respect interrupts him; he tries it again, to say if he can that he had been wearing asses' ears, but his lips refuse that indignity and he gives it up, much to Shakspeare's credit.

A student of Shakspeare often finds himself wandering waterless and foodless in the sage-brush of æsthetic criticism. Heraud, in his book entitled "Shakspeare, his Inner Life," suggests that when Bottom "transmogrified" the text, "The eye of man hath not seen," &c., so