As sensual as the brutish sting itself; And all the embossed sores and headed evils This, and that he was one of the three or four loving lords who put themselves into voluntary exile with the old Duke, leaving their lands and revenues to enrich the new one, who therefore gave them good leave to wander, is all we know about him, until he is formally announced to us as the melancholy Jaques. The very announcement is a tolerable proof that he is not soul-stricken in any material degree. When Rosalind tells him that he is considered to be a melancholy fellow, he is hard put to it to describe in what his melancholy consists. "I have," he says: "Neither the scholar's melancholy, which Is emulation; nor the musician's, which is Which is ambitious; nor the lawyer's, which Of many simples, extracted from many objects, The sundry contemplation of my travels, In which my* often rumination wraps me In a most humorous sadness."t * The old folio, by which Collier amended the text of his last edition of Shakespeare (republished by Redfield of New York), reads this line : "In which by often rumination robs me." The alteration The monosyllable my is the reading of the second folio.-M. † This is printed as prose, but assuredly it is blank verse. of a syllable or two, which in the corrupt state of the text of these plays is the slightest of all possible critical licenses, would make it run perfectly smooth. At all events, in the second line, "emulation" should be "emulative," to make it agree with the other clauses of the sentence. The courtier's melancholy is not pride, nor the soldier's ambition, &c. The adjective is used throughout — fantastical, proud, ambitious, politic, nice.—W. M. VOL. III.-3. He is nothing more than an idle gentleman given to musing, and making invectives against the affairs of the world, which are more remarkable for the poetry of their style and expression than the pungency of their satire. His famous description of the seven ages of man is that of a man who has seen but little to complain of in his career through life. The sorrows of his infant are of the slightest kind, and he notes that it is taken care of in a nurse's lap. The griefs of his schoolboy are confined to the necessity of going to school; and he, too, has had an anxious hand to attend to him. His shining morning face reflects the superintendence of one-probably a mother-interested in his welfare. The lover is tortured by no piercing pangs of love, his woes evaporating themselves musically in a ballad of his own composition, written not to his mistress, but fantastically addressed to her eyebrow. The soldier appears in all the pride and the swelling hopes of his spirit-stirring trade, "Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel, Even in the cannon's mouth." The fair round belly of the justice lined with good capon lets us know how he has passed his life. He is full of ease, magisterial authority, and squirely dignity. The lean and slippered pantaloon, and the dotard sunk into second childishness, have suffered only the common lot of humanity, without any of the calamities that embitter the unavoidable malady of old age.* All the characters in Jaques's sketch are well taken care of. The infant is nursed; the boy educated; the youth tormented with no greater cares than the necessity of hunting after rhymes to please the ear of a lady, whose love sits so lightly upon him as to set him upon nothing more serious than such a self-amusing task; the man in prime of life is engaged in gallant deeds, brave in action, anxious for character, and ambitious of fame; * "Senectus ipsa est morbus."-Ter. Phorm. IV. i. 9.-W. M. the man in declining years has won the due honors of his rank, he enjoys the luxuries of the table and dispenses the terrors of the bench; the man of age still more advanced is well to do in the world. If his shank be shrunk, it is not without hose and slipper-if his eyes be dim, they are spectacled-if his years have made him lean, they have gathered for him wherewithal to fatten the pouch by his side. And when this strange eventful history is closed by the penalties paid by men who live too long, Jaques does not tell us that the helpless being, "Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything," is left unprotected in his helplessness. Such pictures of life do not proceed from a man very heavy at heart. Nor can it be without design that they are introduced into this especial place. The moment before, the famished Orlando has burst in upon the sylvan meal of the Duke, brandishing a naked sword, demanding with furious threat food for himself and his helpless companion, 'Oppressed with two weak evils, age and hunger." The Duke, struck with his earnest appeal, can not refrain from comparing the real suffering which he witnesses in Orlando with that which is endured by himself and his co-mates, and partners in exile. Addressing Jaques, he says:— "Thou seest we are not all alone unhappy: This wide and universal theatre Presents more woful pageants than the scene But the spectacle and the comment upon it lightly touch Jaques, and he starts off at once into a witty and poetic comparison of the real drama of the world with the mimic drama of the stage, in which, with the sight of well-nurtured youth driven to the "Wherein we play * Query on? "Wherein we play in" is tautological. on," i. e. "continue to play."-W. M. savage desperation of periling his own life, and assailing that of others—and of weakly old age lying down in the feeble but equally resolved desperation of dying by the wayside, driven to this extremity by sore fatigue and hunger-he diverts himself and his audience, whether in the forest or theatre, on the stage or in the closet, with graphic descriptions of human life; not one of them, proceeding as they do from the lips of the melancholy Jaques, presenting a single point on which true melancholy can dwell. Mourning over what can not be avoided must be in its essence common-place, and nothing has been added to the lamentations over the ills brought by the flight of years since Moses, the man of God,* declared the concluding period of protracted life to be a period of labor and sorrow; since Solomon, or whoever else writes under the name of the Preacher, in a passage which, whether it is inspired or not, is a passage of exquisite beauty, warned us to provide in youth, "while the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them; while the sun, or the light, or the moon, or the stars be not darkened, nor the clouds return after the rain: in the day when the keepers of the house shall tremble, and the strong men shall bow themselves, and the grinders cease because they are few, and those that look out of the windows be darkened, and the doors shall be shut in the streets, when the sound of the grinding is low, and he shall rise up at the voice of the bird, and all the daughters of music shall be brought low; also when they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way, and the almondtree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burthen, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern;" or, to make a *Psalm xc. "A prayer of Moses, the man of God," v. 10.-W. M. shorter quotation, since Homer summed up all these ills by applying to old age the epithet of wypos—a word which can not be translated, but the force of which must be felt. Abate these unavoidable misfortunes, and the catalogue of Jaques is that of happy conditions. In his visions there is no trace of the child doomed to wretchedness before its very birth; no hint that such a thing could occur as its being made an object of calculation, one part medical, three parts financial, to the starveling surgeon, whether by the floating of the lungs, or other test equally fallacious and fee-producing, the miserable mother may be convicted of doing that which, before she had attempted, all that is her soul of woman must have been torn from its uttermost roots, when in an agony of shame and dread the child that was to have made her forget her labor was committed to the cesspool. No hint that the days of infancy should be devoted to the damnation of a factory, or to the tender mercies of a parish beadle. No hint that philosophy should come forward armed with the panoply offensive and defensive of logic and eloquence, to prove that the inversion of all natural relations was just and wise—that the toil of childhood was due to the support of manhood—that those hours, the very labors of which even the etymologists give to recreation, should be devoted to those wretched drudgeries which seem to split the heart of all but those who derive from them blood-stained money, or bloodbedabbled applause. Jaques sees not Greensmith squeezing his children by the throat until they die.* He hears not the supplication of the hapless boy begging his still more hapless father for a moment's respite, ere the fatal handkerchief is twisted round his throat by the hand of him to whom he owed his being. Jaques thinks not of the baby deserted on the step *A melancholy case, which made some sensation in London, in 1837. An unhappy man named Greensmith, unable to obtain “daily food for daily toil," too proud to beg, and too virtuous to steal, killed his own children and himself, in the utter hopelessness and distraction of want.-M. |