The quintessence of all these comedies (as we may say of _Hamlet_ in respect of the great tragedies) is the _Midsummer Night's Dream._ Here the quick ardours, the inconstancies, the caprices, the illusions, the delusions, every sort of love folly, become embodied and weave a world of their own, as living and as real as that of those who are visited by these affections, tormented or rendered ecstatic, raised on high or hurled downward by them, in such a way that everything is equally real or equally fantastic, as you may please to call it. The sense of dream, of a dream-reality, persists and prevents our feeling the chilly sense of allegory or of apology. The little drama seems born of a smile, so delicate, refined and ethereal it is. Graceful and delicate to a degree is also the setting of the dream, the celebration of the wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta and the theatrical performance of the artisans, for these are not merely ridiculous in their clumsiness; they are also childlike and ingenuous, arousing a sort of gay pity: we do not laugh at them: we smile. Oberon and Titania are at variance owing to reciprocal wrongs, and trouble has arisen in the world. Puck obeys the command of Oberon and sets to work, teasing, punishing and correcting. But in performing this duty of punishing and correcting, he too makes mistakes, and the love intrigue becomes more complicated and active. Here we find a resemblance to the rapid passage into opposite states and the strange complications that arose in Italian knightly romances, as the result of drinking the water from one of two opposite fountains whereof one filled the heart with amorous desires, the other turned first ardours to ice. In Titania, who embraces the Ass's head and raves about him, caressing and looking upon him as a graceful and gracious creature, the comedy creates a symbol so ample and so efficacious as rightly to have become proverbial. Puck meanwhile, astonished at the effect upon men of the subtle intoxication that he has been himself distributing, exclaims in his surprise "Lord, what fools these mortals be!"; and Lysander, one of the madmen who are constantly passing from one love to another, from one thing to its opposite, is nevertheless perfectly convinced that "The will of man is by his _reason_ sway'd; And _reason says_ you are the _worthier_ maid." Yet the individual reality of the figures appears through this exquisite version of the eternal comedy, as though to remind us that they really belong to life. Helena follows the man she loves, but who does not love her, like a lapdog, which, the more it is beaten, the more it runs round and round its master; she trembles at the outbreak of furious jealousy in her little friend Hermia, who threatens to put out her eyes, believing her to be capable of it, when she remembers the time when they were at school together: