Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/93

 involved with all the vulgarities of the world, and justice itself, which is nothing if not critical, cannot make up its case without non sequiturs.

When a stratagem compels the braggart Parolles in "All's Well that Ends Well" to show the white feather, he says adroitly, "Who cannot be crushed by a plot?" But absence of plot is quite as hostile to our luck, and goodness and beauty provide no immunity against it. Two soldiers, who had been sent to arrest the Duchess de Berri, rigorously searched for her a whole house over to no purpose; then, lighting a fire to warm their fingers, roasted her out from a hiding place behind the chimney. A Jacobite climbing into the hollow of an oak leaves his garter on a twig to make a silly advertisement of him. Major Andre meets two men who are not looking for him, and convinces them that he is the very man they ought to seek. Dogberry and his men are as apposite as the female toggery which trips up an escaping rebel; and through them Shakspeare delights to apprise us of a world in which knavery may be outwitted by fatuity.

MALVOLIO.

The humor in the play of "Twelfth Night" resides in the contriving to make one vice ridiculous by other vices which are also absurd. Not one of the comic characters, taken separately, provides the peculiar element of humor. It transpires during the impartial