“Bot. I have a reasonable good ear in music. Let’s have the tongs and bones.
“Tit. Or say, sweet love, what thou desir’st to eat.
“Bot. Truly a peck of provender: I could munch your good dry oats. Methinks I have a great desire to a bottle of hay: good hay, sweet hay, hath no fellow.
“Tit. I have a venturous fairy that shall seek
The squirrel’s hoard, and fetch thee new nuts.
“Bot. I had rather have a handful or two of dried peas. But, I pray you, let none of your people stir me: I have an exposition of sleep come upon me.
“Tit. Sleep thou, and I will wind thee in my arms.
Fairies, be gone, and be always away.
So doth the woodbine the sweet honeysuckle
Gently entwist; the female ivy so
Enrings the barky fingers of the elm.
Oh, how I love thee! how I dote on thee!”
Is this a scene of mere fairy-land? No; but a thing of hard, every-day prosaic life. Have we not about us the children, the thick-headed descendants of Bottom, with the Titania fortune tempting them to the enjoyments of the rarest and sweetest delights? and yet the coarse animal craving of
“The shallowest thick-skin of that barren sort,”
make answer to her dainty invitations with the poorest, coarsest desires! A goddess bids them choose music, and they are for nothing but “tongs and bones.” Fortune prays them to the banquet on immortal food, and, with asinine stubbornness, they bray for “a handful or two of dried peas.” They are warbled to by a goddess, and, unconscious of the homage, they make answer with the sense of an ass. We ask it, did Bottom die childless?
Bottom’s babes flourish in twenty paths of life. We meet his children in the stock-market; we see them sleek and smug behind the counter; we catch their faces through carriage windows; we hear their tuneful voices from the county-bench, the city-court, yea, in nobler convocations still. Sometimes, too, like their Athenian father, they are “translated.” No matter for the difference of calling, the influence of education, there is the family face—the family voice; the expression of self-blessed insensibility, the note of self-complacent gratulation. Throughout the life-teeming page of Shakespeare there is not a finer poetic rendering of a commonplace, vulgar class than Bottom.