It may be interesting for a moment to set side by side the jester exhibited in the pages of Shakspere and the good Master Owlglass. Historical Owlglass there certainly was at some time of the fourteenth century, his tomb yet standing at Möllen, as will be seen; but the pranks of many excellent jesters were all centred in the book telling of Owlglass; so that he has been overlaid with jokes, not in his own power to perform. Indeed, in the present edition, from a respect I have for chronology, I have been obliged to extrude two or three which would have involved anachronisms. However, they were somewhat dull, and therefore need not be regretted. The first English version of Owlglass (as to which see the Appendix, p. 220) having been published early in the sixteenth century, in a “little dumpy quarto,” by Master William Copland, its fame might, without much difficulty, have infiltrated the country parts of England; and, if we regard the clowns of Shakspere, Touchstone, in “As You Like It,” for example, it might appear that Shakspere had seen this Black Letter of William Copland: yet, while the humour of Owlglass consists in his stolid performance of the exact words commanded him, there is clearly a quite other appreciation of wit in the English writer. It is, in fact, the polished foil beside the homely cudgel—both effective weapons, but one of them far more glittering, swift, and murderous. The cudgel may be warded off by a less skilful hand, the glancing steel hath made a wound, and been withdrawn in the very flash of its own rapidity. Dogberry and Verges, Costard perhaps, nay, even Sir Toby Belch, have points of character more resembling Owlglass than do the clowns of our great poet. The Fool in King Lear, has some kin to him, but is infinitely wiser. Indeed, we might perhaps rather class Bardolph, Pistol, and Nym, humourists in their way, with Master Owlglass than the subtle wits Shakspere brings upon the stage. Yet has Owlglass an existence beyond and outside all question of contrast, all opinion of similarity. Gervinus, in his comprehensive History of German Fiction[5] has well defined Owlglass to be “the personified quip and crank” (_der personificirte Schwank_). In fact, he is a Gothic Diogenes set in a Teutonic frame, living, moving, and having his being in an atmosphere as peculiarly distinct in its grotesque and massive proportions, as was the earlier Hellenic age, in its union of elegance and power. No previous time could have produced such an out-birth, and, with all our modern tendencies towards humour, fostered by the constant study of our quainter dramatists, another Owlglass would be a distortion, if not an impossibility.