But a highly successful deficiency of education does not make Bottom arrogant. As Athenian dicast, foreman of an English jury, republican officer under investigation, his suavity would be unimpeachable. He is good-tempered, and the first tap of flattery cracks his whole pretension; so that the crafty Quince manages to cast him for Pyramus, who was just such another sweet-faced and destructive lady's man.
Dogberry's malapropisms are inflations made by his vanity to float him into an appearance of sagacity, donkeys' hides blown up to take him across the stream of intercourse. But Bottom miscalls his words from sheer rusticity, and not from any effort to borrow the language of his superiors. The word "alleviate" which he has sometimes heard has been dribbling from brain-cell to cell, and so struggles unconsciously into "aggravate" at last. He uses genteel words which have stayed out of town so long as to be countrified; he has not picked them up, but they have blown into his mind and lodged there, like mallow-seeds. So we see that he is in most senses a born natural, proprietor by birth of the crest which at last he wears. But he is not all fool, for when he wakes out of his exposition of sleep and says he has had a dream, we notice that he is reluctant to expound it. He begins, "Methought I was,"--but a feeling of self-respect interrupts him; he tries it again, to say if he can that he had been wearing asses' ears, but his lips refuse that indignity and he gives it up, much to Shakspeare's credit.
A student of Shakspeare often finds himself wandering waterless and foodless in the sage-brush of æsthetic criticism. Heraud, in his book entitled "Shakspeare, his Inner Life," suggests that when Bottom "transmogrified" the text, "The eye of man hath not seen," &c., so that the new gospel according to Bottom ran thus, "The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man's hand is not able to taste," &c., Shakspeare intended to imply that the changing and translating of Bottom shadowed forth the manner in which we shall be transformed in the future life; "but to have done this directly would have been undramatic and otherwise objectionable." This affronts and takes advantage of Bottom's want of intelligence, who might well caution the critic: "Monsieur Cobweb! good Monsieur, get your weapons in your hand, and kill me a red-hipped humble-bee on the top of a thistle; and, good Monsieur, bring me the honey-bag. And, good Monsieur, have a care the honey-bag break not: I would be loath to have you overflown with a honey-bag." But this surfeiting freshet of the modern revival spreads all over Shakspeare's meadows of daisies and forget-me-nots.