vague sense of sympathy for all the varying pathos of human hope, and ambition, and glory gone and crumbled like its crumbling walls; for the story ever old of human life, how young and bright soever, passing too soon to death and dull oblivion; we will couple with our last look the closing lines of that last and noblest poem ever heard within the walls of Ludlow, words which sum up the lessons we may read in all that part of the past which is really immortal:

Heaven hath timely tried their youth,

Their faith, their patience, and their truth,
And sent them here through hard assays
With a crown of deathless praise.

Mortals, that would follow me,
Love Virtue, she alone is free;
She can teach ye how to climb
Higher than the spheary chime:
Or, if Virtue feeble were,
Heaven itself would stoop to her.

W

AS YOU LIKE IT

HEN, about 1598, Shakespeare had finished that great cycle of historical dramas which culminated

in the Henry IV and the Henry V, he betook himself for a time exclusively to comedy. For three or four years he seems to have written nothing else. Why this was we cannot now tell. It may possibly have been because comedy was wanted by the theatrical company for which he was writing, or for some other such purely external reason. But one naturally prefers to think that after the stress of passionate feeling and heroic action which for some five years he had been depicting in his great histories and his early tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, he craved variety and relief and gladly turned to the more lightsome side of human experience and the more playful and humorous phases of character. Two comedies, indeed, had probably been written during the years in which he was finishing the Henry IV and the Henry V; but these two comedies— The Merry Wives of Windsor and The Taming of the Shrew-seem to lie upon one side of the main course of Shakespeare's work. He certainly did not put the best of himself into them. It is as if he turned them off rapidly, perhaps to meet some incidental demand, while his thought and interest were mainly given to other work. The Taming of the Shrew, all the critics, I think, now agree, is only in part Shakespeare's work, being probably an old play hurriedly patched up by him, and then enlarged at a later day by some other hand. And The Merry Wives, though it is Shakespeare's throughout, must, it seems to me, have been written at the suggestion of some unwise admirer of Falstaff who thought it would be vastly diverting to see the fat knight in love. But one could wish that Shakespeare had declined to listen to any such suggestion, even though it

came, as tradition asserts, from Elizabeth herself; for Falstaff in The Merry Wives is certainly translated worse than Bottom ever was. Only Sir Hugh and Slender and Mistress Anne, they are delightful and in the true Shakespearian manner.

But when Shakespeare had well finished the histories and was at liberty to turn all his energies into comedy, he wrote those three most delightful plays, the Much Ado About Nothing, the Twelfth Night, the As You Like It. I take it these are the best examples of Shakespeare's pure comedy. It is true that he had already begun in the historical plays to unite tragic and comic elements, and some of his later works, like The Winter's Tale, combine the characteristics of comedy and tragedy in proportions so nearly equal that they cannot with any propriety be called by either name, but are best termed romances. But in these three plays, especially in Twelfth Night and As You Like It, we have pure comedy in its most typical Shakespearian form.

For comedy, in Shakespeare, never aims merely or primarily at the ludicrous. It is not broad or farcical. It admits little mere buffoonery and little grotesque incident. It makes you smile inwardly, but not laugh aloud. Even in his very earliest plays, the effect of comedy is gained not by exhibiting caricature or oddity of character or by farcical incident, but rather by showing us affectations such as we all put on occasionally, sentiments passing into pretty forms of sentimentality, the varying play of moods, the sprightly sallies of wit, and the droll self-importance of stupidity. In these more mature comedies we have a wider experience and so quicker perception and deeper enjoyment of all the humorous phases of life, while there is still less of mere incident or eccentricity. Plays like Twelfth Night and As You Like It are not comedies of laughter, but comedies of gladness. They are the poetry of health, of cheerfulness, of vigor. They seem to me the best expression we have in literature of the full joyousness of living. They awaken in us those thoughts, emotions, and sentiments, that most minister to a refined and healthful happiness, and

they portray in others with charming humor but without any bitterness those peculiar and humorous phases of character that make up so large a part of the innocent pleasures of observation. Take, for instance, two such characters as Rosalind and Jaques in the play before us. What a refreshment in the mere presence of Rosalind! She is like a spring morning; she makes all life seem new and gladsome to us, and we hardly know how. And Jaques,—or Jac-ques as I suppose we must call him since Shakespeare does,-what an immense deal of quiet enjoyment one can get out of him. There is nothing boldly pronounced in the depiction of his character, but what a peculiar and subtly humorous individuality it is! Yet neither of these characters ministers directly to our sense of the ludicrous; they 'tickle us about the heart root,' as Chaucer says somewhere, but they do not tempt us much to laughter.

In such comedy as this love will of course usually furnish the motive upon which the action turns, since without love a life of exquisite gladness is hardly conceivable. It is under the influence of the gentle passion in some of its manifold phases that all the charms and graces of character blossom out most freely. And we must admit, too, that it also warms into humorous activity all the pleasant affectations and whimsicalities; as an old writer would say, it doth greatly breed humors. Think what a various company of lovers we have in these three plays,-Rosalind, bright, witty; Orlando, modest yet poetical; the Duke of Twelfth Night, sentimental and dreamy-in love with being in love; Viola, gentle, tender, and wise; Beatrice, with that tart tongue of hers that, we are sure, made life racy for Benedick the rest of his days; Malvolio, the inimitable, who never felt his own worth till his lady seemed to shine upon it; Touchstone, who is so determined not to be blinded by any illusions of beauty that he deliberately chooses the ugliest rustic lass he can find,-this is not half the list. And in all it is love that sets in motion whatever in them is most graceful and humorous. The comedy must end happily: but in the course of that true love which we shall not expect

always to run smoothly, there will be abundant opportunity to show some touches of that pathos of self-denial and quiet suffering which lends a moral charm to our comedy and proves its love to be strong as well as sweet. When we have love and all the pretty humors born of love, we must have poetry and music; we shall find in these plays some of Shakespeare's most luxuriant description and his most delicious imagery, while the songs scattered through them are the most dainty and tuneful he ever wrote:

It was a lover and his lass,

With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,

That o'er the green corn-field did pass

In the spring time, the only pretty ring time,
When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding;
Sweet lovers love the spring.

But these comedies are not, like A Midsummer Night's Dream, an exercise in airy and sportive fancy, a revel in all forms of the beautiful for its own sake. Shakespeare came to their composition when he was just reaching the prime of his early manhood. The experience of ten years had not been lost upon him. The plays impress us at once as much wiser than his early comedies. There is a penetration and thoughtfulness in them that we do not see in The Two Gentlemen of Verona or A Midsummer Night's Dream. The charm of the principal characters, like Rosalind and Beatrice, is largely an intellectual one. The plays are full of the most pithy and sententious observations. If they have not that ripeness, that almost over-fulness of meaning and of feeling that one finds in the latest plays, they clearly mark a period when Shakespeare's intellectual powers were in their prime-he was about thirty-eight, you remember and his life, not yet brought under the shadow of any great sorrow or any great doubt still felt the buoyant joyousness of youth.

Of the three comedies most would, I think, select as the best either the Twelfth Night or the As You Like It, but as between these two I suspect there would be much difference of opinion. One likes best the one he has read last; on