been designed. The Poet keeps his geography true enough whenever he has cause to do so. He knew, at all events, that lions did not roam at large in France. By this irregular combination of actual things, he informs the whole with ideal effect, giving to this charming issue of his brain "a local habitation and a name," that it may link-in with our fleshand-blood sympathies, and at the same time turning it into a wild, wonderful, remote, fairy-land region, where all sorts of poetical things may take place without the slightest difficulty. Of course Shakespeare would not have done thus, but that he saw quite through the grand critical humbug which makes the proper effect of a work of art depend upon our belief in the actual occurrence of the thing represented. But your “critic grave and cool," I suppose, is one who, like Wordsworth's "model of a child,"

Can string you names of districts, cities, towns,
The whole world over, tight as beads of dew
Upon a gossamer thread: he sifts, he weighs;
All things are put to question; he must live
Knowing that he grows wiser every day,
Or else not live at all, and seeing too
Each little drop of wisdom as it falls
Into the dimpling cistern of his heart.
O, give us once again the wishing-cap
Of Fortunatus, and the invisible coat
Of Jack the Giant-killer, Robin Hood,
And Sabra in the forest with Saint George!
The child, whose love is here, at least doth reap
One precious gain, that he forgets himself.

As far as I can determine the matter, As You Like It is, upon the whole, my favourite of Shakespeare's comedies. Yet I should be puzzled to tell why; for my preference springs not so much from any particular points or features, wherein it is surpassed by several others, as from the general

toning and effect. The whole is replete with a beauty so delicate yet so intense, that we feel it everywhere, but can never tell especially where it is, or in what it consists. For instance, the descriptions of forest scenery come along so unsought, and in such easy, quiet, natural touches, that we take in the impression without once noticing what it is that impresses us. Thus, there is a certain woodland freshness, a glad, free naturalness, that creeps and steals into the heart before we know it. And the spirit of the place is upon its inhabitants, its genius within them: we almost breathe with them the fragrance of the Forest, and listen to "the melodies of woods and winds and waters," and feel

The Power, the Beauty, and the Majesty,

That have their haunts in dale, or piny mountain,
Or forest by slow stream, or pebbly spring.

Even the Court Fool, notwithstanding all the crystallizing process that has passed upon him, undergoes, as we have seen, a sort of rejuvenescence of his inner man, so that his wit catches at every turn the fresh hues and odours of his new whereabout. I am persuaded indeed that Milton had a special eye to this play in the lines,

And sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy's child,
Warbles his native wood-notes wild.

To all which add, that the kindlier sentiments here seem playing out in a sort of jubilee. Untied from set purposes and definite aims, the persons come forth with their hearts already tuned, and so have but to let off their redundant music. Envy, jealousy, avarice, revenge, all the passions that afflict and degrade society, they have left in the city behind them. And they have brought the intelligence and refinement of the Court without its vanities and vexations;

so that the graces of art and the simplicities of nature meet together in joyous, loving sisterhood. A serene and mellow atmosphere of thought encircles and pervades the actors in this drama; as if on purpose to illustrate how

One impulse from a vernal wood

May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil, and of good,

Than all the sages can.

Nature throws her protecting arms around them; Beauty pitches her tents before them; Heaven rains its riches upon them with "no enemy but Winter and rough weather," Peace hath taken up her abode with them; and they have nothing to do but to "fleet the time carelessly, as they did in the golden world."

But no words of mine, I fear, will justify to others my own sense of this delectable workmanship. I can hardly think of any thing else in the whole domain of Poetry so inspiring of the faith that " every flower enjoys the air it breathes." The play, indeed, abounds in wild, frolicsome graces which cannot be described; which can only be seen and felt; and which the hoarse voice of Criticism seems to scare away, as the crowing of the cocks is said to have scared away the fairy spirits from their nocturnal pastimes. I know not how I can better dismiss the theme than with some lines from Wordsworth, which these scenes have often recalled to my thoughts:

Nature never did betray

The heart that loved her; 'tis her privilege
Through all the years of this our life to lead
From joy to joy: for she can so inform
The mind that is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,

Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
The dreary intercourse of daily life,

Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb

Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold
Is full of blessings.

Partly in confirmation and partly in amplification of my own views, as given above, and partly for other reasons, I add the following from Professor Dowden's excellent book, entitled Shakespeare: his Mind and Art, which was written since the foregoing pages were first published:

66

Upon the whole, As You Like It is the sweetest and happiest of all Shakespeare's comedies. No one suffers; no one lives an eager intense life; there is no tragic interest in it, as there is in The Merchant of Venice, as there is in Much Ado about Nothing. It is mirthful, but the mirth is sprightly, graceful, exquisite; there is none of the rollicking fun of Sir Toby here; the songs are not 'coziers' catches' shouted in the night-time, 'without any mitigation or remorse of voice,' but the solos and duets of pages in the wild-wood, or the noisier chorus of foresters. The wit of Touchstone is not mere clownage, nor has it any indirect serious significances : it is a dainty kind of absurdity worthy to hold comparison with the melancholy Jaques. And Orlando in the beauty and strength of early manhood, and Rosalind, a gallant curtle-axe upon her thigh, a boar-spear in her hand,' and the bright, tender, loyal womanhood within, are figures which quicken and restore our spirits, as music does, which is neither noisy nor superficial, and yet which knows little of the deep passion and sorrow of the world.

"Shakespeare, when he wrote this idyllic play, was himself in the Forest of Arden. He had ended one great ambition, the historical plays; and not yet commenced

his tragedies. It was a resting-place. He sends his imagination into the woods to find repose. Instead of the Court and camps of England, and the embattled plains of France, here was this woodland scene, where the palm-tree, the lioness, and the serpent are to be found; possessed of a flora and fauna that flourish in spite of physical geographers. There is an open-air feeling throughout the play. The dialogue, as has been observed, catches freedom and freshness from the atmosphere. After the trumpet-tones of Henry the Fifth comes the sweet pastoral strain, so bright, so tender. Must it not be all in keeping? Shakespeare was not trying to control his melancholy. When he needed to do that, Shakespeare confronted his melancholy very passionately, and looked it full in the face. Here he needed. refreshment, a sunlight tempered by forest-boughs, a breeze upon his forehead, a stream murmuring in his ears."