man's conceit is the particular cherished bunion for another man's foot to inadvertently outrage. A straight blow in the chest, hit out from the shoulder, is a signal to measure your strength with another man. But to measure your weakness with him makes you wince. How adroitly Ulysses "rubs the vein" of Ajax's pride! As soon as the first ripple of Ulysses's blarney reaches his feet, he begins to float like a bladder of rapture, and goes bobbing enormously into the net they have spread for him. When the plot begins to affect him, Thersites observes that "he goes up and down the field asking for himself." As Douglas Jerrold would say: "He stalks as though Colossus had quitted Rhodes to head a company." "He must fight singly to-morrow with Hector, and is so prophetically proud of an heroical cudgelling, that he raves in saying nothing." Then he describes him as a veritable Malvolio in armor. Is he really in Olivia's garden, with Sir Toby and the rest on the watch? "Why, he stalks up and down like a peacock; a stride, and a stand; ruminates like an hostess that hath no arithmetic but her brain to set down her reckoning; bites his lip with a politic regard,[4] as who should say, 'There were wit in this head, an't would out.' The man's undone for ever; for if Hector break not his neck in the combat, he'll break't himself in vain-glory. He knows not me. I said, 'Good morrow, Ajax;' and he replies, 'Thanks, Agamemnon.' What think you of this man that takes me for the general? He's grown a very land-fish, languageless, a monster. A plague of opinion! a man may wear it on both sides, like a leather jerkin." Thersites does not allude to opinions which may be turned as easily as a jacket, but to the opinionative temper; nothing turns us so neatly inside out as our good opinion of ourselves. Shakspeare uses the word "opinion" occasionally in this sense; as in I Henry IV. iii. I, where Worcester criticises Hotspur's disposition:-- "Defect of manners, want of government, Pride, haughtiness, opinion, and disdain." So, whether in armor, in a swallow-tail, or in a surplice, our peacock vein expands around the world. Then Thersites proposes to imitate the austere conceit of Ajax: "Let Patroclus make his demands to me, you shall see the pageant of Ajax." This is done, and the freezing brevity of Thersites is exactly like Malvolio's in the height of his fantasy, when Sir Toby and the rest offer to converse with him. BOTTOM.