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“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.