him a gay and hardly human figure; it fell, perhaps finally, for English
drama. That manner of man--Arlecchino, or Harlequin--had outlived his
playmates, Pantaleone, Brighella, Colombina, and the Clown. A little of
Pantaleone survives in old Capulet, a little in the father of the Shrew,
but the life of Mercutio in the one play, and of the subordinate Tranio
in the other, is less quickly spent, less easily put out, than the
smouldering of the old man. Arlecchino frolics in and out of the tragedy
and comedy of Shakespeare, until he thus dies in his lightest, his
brightest, his most vital shape.

Arlecchino, the tricksy and shifty spirit, the contriver, the busybody,
the trusty rogue, the wonder-worker, the man in disguise, the mercurial
one, lives on buoyantly in France to the age of Moliere. He is officious
and efficacious in the skin of Mascarille and Ergaste and Scapin; but he
tends to be a lacquey, with a reference rather to Antiquity and the Latin
comedy than to the Middle Ages, as on the English stage his mere memory
survives differently to a later age in the person of "Charles, his
friend." What convinces me that he virtually died with Mercutio is
chiefly this--that this comrade of Romeo's lives so keenly as to be fully
capable of the death that he takes at Tybalt's sword-point; he lived
indeed, he dies indeed. Another thing that marks the close of a career
of ages is his loss of his long customary good luck. Who ever heard of
Arlecchino unfortunate before, at fault with his sword-play, overtaken by
tragedy? His time had surely come. The gay companion was to bleed;
Tybalt's sword had made a way. 'Twas not so deep as a well nor so wide
as a church-door, but it served.

Some confusion comes to pass among the typical figures of the primitive
Italian play, because Harlequin, on that conventional little stage of the
past, has a hero's place, whereas when he interferes in human affairs he