which ground I am now inclined to prefer the As You Like It. But whether the As You Like It be the best of Shakespeare's comedies or not, I am quite sure that it is the most typical, the purest example of that kind of comedy which Shakespeare preferred. There is certainly less variety in it and less contrast than in the Twelfth Night. There is no loud mirth in it like that of Aguecheek and Sir Toby, no broadly ridiculous affectations like those of Malvolio, no such intensity of feeling as sometimes seems to suffuse for a moment the gracious talk of Viola. It seems as if Shakespeare would not venture to disturb the romantic charm of this play of As You Like It by admitting to it any broad humor whatever; and while he made it serious as well as gladsome, he would allow no strain of real sadness to invade its music. In As You Like It everything is airy, refined, romantic. And I have always thought in the name he gave it Shakespeare meant to indicate, among other things, his confidence that this time, at least, we must like his work.

We know where he found the plot of the play so far as it has any plot. Among that half score of young fellows who in the decade between 1580 and 1590 managed to combine the parts of scholar, adventurer, and poet was one Thomas Lodge. He began as a writer of rather overpretty lyrics, tried some dramas not very successfully, and after a wild and roving youth, gave up literature and sobered himself into a physician. His most fortunate literary attempts were long pastoral romances, a kind of fiction then much in vogue, of which Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia is the best known example. The rough and boisterous spirits of the day seemed to delight in imaginations of a delicious sylvan country where all impossible beauties were heaped in endless profusion. Of Lodge's romances the best is one he wrote on shipboard, while voyaging in the tropics for glory and booty under one Captain Clarke. "To beguile the time with labor," says he, "I writ this book; rough as hatched in the storms of the ocean and feathered in the surges of many perilous seas, . . . when every line was wet with a surge, and every humorous passion counterchecked

with a storm." This romance of Rosalynde, printed in 1590, is the book in which Shakespeare found the whole plot of As You Like It. The forest, the banished duke, the banished brother, and the banished maiden who masquerades in male attire with the faithful cousin who shares her exile, the old servant Adam, the lover who carves his verses on the trees,-all these, with other minor incidents, Shakespeare found ready to his hand in Lodge's book. From Lodge's book, too, he may have gained besides the plot and the names of his personages some faint suggestion of that exquisite pastoral atmosphere so delightful in his play; but he could hardly have got anything more than that. The characters of his play are entirely of his own creation, and for three of them, Jaques, Touchstone, and Audrey, he found no hint in the romance of Lodge, or anywhere else, so far as we know. And it need hardly be said the felicities of diction, the wealth of wisdom, wit, and imagination in the play are entirely his own.

The central purpose in the plot of the play is to select a company of people of characteristics sufficiently varied to produce pleasing dramatic contrasts, and then to place these people in such circumstances as shall remove at once the restraints and conventions of an artificial society and leave each one free to follow the impulses of his nature. These lords and ladies are placed in the sunny glades of the forest of Arden and left to do as they like. The object of the poet is not, primarily, to contrast the artificial life of courts with the natural life of the country,-it isn't a pretty object-lesson in Rousseau,-for the banished duke, and Orlando, and the ladies all carry with them into the forest characters that have been formed under the pressure of active life and have known care and sorrow. Still less did Shakespeare have any purpose to show that ministry of nature to uplift and purify human thought of which in more recent poetry we have, perhaps, heard quite enough,—that is a modern Wordsworthian notion. No, Shakespeare's purpose was simply to give us a picture of life in such idyllic surroundings as we all dream of, but never find. It would

be something, we often think, to be well out of Mrs. Grundy's neighborhood, to begin with. It is much more to be released from the constant stress and urgency, to be out of the care and fret, the dull routine that makes life not only toilsome but prosaic. We never quite get rid of a primitive sylvan impulse: it is this that makes pastoral and idyllic poetry always; it is some vague and groping form of this desire that will lead half of us in the next two months to abandon the comforts of civilization and brave the terrors of country board, or lead some-wiser and more fortunate-into the solitudes of the Maine woods or the Adirondacks. Yet we do not really wish to forego the graces of intellect and manners. If we think we can surrender some of the comforts, we cannot give up the amenities of life. Our ideal pastoral country must not lie in the land of the Philistines. The wit and wisdom, the brilliant converse, the beauty and graces, of society, along with the freedom, the freshness, and joyance of nature,—where shall we find that combination? Where? Why in the Forest of Arden. In these cool woodland spaces, where the interlacing shadows dance upon the dewy ground, and the deer come down. to the brawling brooks to drink, here is a little company of people who have brought hither all the urbanity that courts can teach and all the sober thoughtfulness that long and varied experience can give, but who find here the burden of convention and artificiality lifted off at once, so that all natural impulses can blossom out without restraint, and they can "fleet the time carelessly as they did in the golden world." When you and I try to picture life as we should like it, doesn't the forest of Arden come oftenest to our thought?

There's not much action in the play-as, indeed, why should there be? There is nothing to be done in the forest of Arden. That is the charm of it; here feel we not the penalty of Adam. Yet there is no monotony or dull inaction, for the play sparkles with wit and life from beginning to end. The interest, therefore, arises mostly from what is said, and from a kind of sprightly and gladsome feeling that seems to pervade the play, without coming into expression much more prominently at any one point than another.

The first act serves for little more than to get Orlando and Rosalind in love with each other, and to get all the people fairly started for the forest. At the opening of the play, you remember, the usurping Duke, Frederick, has already driven his elder brother, the real Duke, into exile. Rosalind, the daughter of this banished Duke, however, still remains with her cousin Celia at the court of her usurping uncle, until Frederick, getting to dislike her as a constant reminder of his injustice to her father, commands her also to leave the court, and she goes, with her cousin Celia and the court fool, Touchstone, to the forest of Arden, whither her father has preceded her. The other bad man of the play, Oliver, is of the same unfraternal temper, withholds from his younger brother, Orlando, the share of the paternal estate due him, treats him with studied rudeness, and soon manages to inveigle him into a match with Duke Frederick's wrestler, which he thinks will be the death of him. But Orlando throws the vaunting wrestler, at the same time catching the fancy of Rosalind, who is looking on. And a little later, learning that his brother is plotting against him, he, too, with the trusty servant, Adam, goes out to complete the company of exiles in the forest of Arden. Shakespeare is not careful to portray very clearly the characters of these two men who are so hard-hearted toward their brothers, because he wishes to concentrate our attention upon the group in the forest. He is, however, concerned to give us at least a glimpse of the real character of Oliver, since he is to introduce him again, in the last part of the play, you remember, as the lover of Celia. We are

made to see, therefore, just what is the motive of Oliver's hatred for Orlando. Oliver is naturally haughty, reserved, and so unpopular. Nobody likes him, and nobody gives him credit even for what good there is in him. And so, as often happens with such men, his unpopularity changes his reserve into moroseness and suspicion. His brother, Orlando, on the contrary, is open, affable, and sunnytempered, wins golden opinions from all opinions from all sorts of people. It is almost inevitable that Oliver should envy Orlando, and natural that he should envy him all the more because Orlando accepts his envy with quiet indifference which seems to imply a conscious superiority. Oliver lets out the real cause of his hatred in a bit of soliloquy, after he has been plotting with the wrestler to get rid of his brother:

I hope I shall see an end of him; for my soul, yet I know not why, hates nothing more than he. Yet he's gentle; never school'd, and yet learned; full of noble device; of all sorts enchantingly beloved; and indeed so much in the heart of the world, and especially of my own people, who best know him, that I am altogether misprised.

Envy like this will never be broken by resentment or indifference, but you will observe what a fine touch of truth and nature it is that this brother when, in the last act, he is given a sudden and overwhelming proof of the wronged Orlando's forgiving temper should melt down at once, and take his brother to his heart. Still more true is the poetic judgment that makes this mistrustful and jealous-tempered man, when first in his life he feels the power of one generous love, open his heart to another, and find a fascination in the straightforward, practical Celia.

Dr. Johnson, in his few words of comment on this play, says with a rather ponderous attempt at archness of manner, "I know not how the ladies will approve the facility with which Rosalind and Celia give away their hearts." Shakespeare by his practice in many of his plays manifestly leans towards the opinion he makes Phoebe quote from Marlowe,