the inherent qualities of his character, as well as to interest us in his fate; and is arrived at that state of sylvan quiet where, having nothing to do but "fleet the time carelessly, as they did in the golden world," he naturally surrenders himself to his new-born passion for the "heavenly Rosalind." The new developement of both characters, but especially that of the heroine, in the course of the very originally imagined courtship which ensues between the lover and his disguised mistress, must form the subject of another paper. This is one of those among Shakespeare's more subtle and delicate delineations, respecting which great misconception has existed. We shall therefore take some pains, by a diligent exposition of the matter, to cause more justice to be rendered to those noble and tender graces in the spirit of his Rosalind, to the unfolding and enhancing of which, he has made her gayest sprightliness purely subservient.

2.-ROSALIND AND ORLANDO, IN THE FOREST OF ARDEN.

[July 20th, 1844.]

THE life which the banished duke and his companions are leading in the Forest of Arden, may be properly regarded as an idealization of the outlawed forest life of the Middle Ages in general, and of England especially. This must appear to any one who shall well consider the answer which, in the opening scene of this play, the usurping duke's wrestler, Charles, makes to Oliver de Bois's enquiry, "Where will the

old duke live ?”—

They say, he is already in the Forest of Arden, and a many merry men with him; and there they live like the old Robin Hood of England: they say, many young gentlemen flock to him

every day; and fleet the time carelessly, as they did in the golden world.

The exiled prince and his followers, indeed, like Robin Hood and his band, are victims of an unjust political revolution: but it has pleased the poet to exclude from his dramatic picture all the vindictive and predatory features which usually, and almost necessarily, marked the sylvan life of men so proscribed, how just soever the cause in which they suffered. He has chosen to exhibit to us only its humaner aspectits careless, its contemplative, and its benevolent characteristics; and, above all, to charm us with a richly-wrought painting of

true, inseparable, faithful loves,

Sticking together in calamity.

Among the prominent figures of the woodland piece, Amiens, with his greenwood carols, represents the careless, light-hearted spirit of the true forester in general: in the cheerful duke and the melancholy Jaques we find the men of somewhat advanced age, of experience and reflection: while Orlando himself personifies the leading spirit of the drama-the spirit of youth, and hope, and love.

On the other hand, the properly pastoral scenes and personages "dwell in the skirts of the forest," as Rosalind says, "like fringe upon a petticoat." Mark, also, the gradations even here. William and Audrey, with their goatherd occupation, represent the class of merest, rudest rustics. "The gods" (that is, the poet) "have made them" purely prosaic, that they may serve as the better foil to those shepherd characters whom he has poetically endowed. The old shepherd, Corin, let us observe as his name would indicate-though he necessarily becomes prosaic in colloquy with that very matter-of-fact though "swift and sententious" personage, Touchstone, belongs properly, as we see in his scenes with Sylvius and with Rosalind, to the ideal portion of the characters. And lastly, Sylvius and Phebe themselves embody the most natural and

delicate among the imaginative graces of the purely pastoral drama.

Celia, we find, assumes the pastoral garb on taking possession of

the cottage and the bounds

That the old Carlot late was master of.

But Rosalind retains the forester's habiliments, for the same reasons which had induced her to assume them. And this it is that enables her to address Orlando, on their first sylvan meeting, as a sort of brotherwoodsman.

Before considering the dialogue which ensues between them, it is necessary to glance at the previous course of the heroine's feelings as exhibited by the dramatist.

In the scene between the cousins which immediately follows that of the wrestling, it will be remembered that the sorrow for her father's exile, which, in the opening of the piece, had engrossed the heart of Rosalind, is clearly shown to be supplanted as her predominant feeling by her "liking for old Sir Rowland's youngest son." The absorbing nature of this new-sprung passion appears again, in the very first words that she utters after she finds herself in safety from the threatened violence of her tyrannic uncle. "O Jupiter! how weary are my spirits!" is her exclamation on her first appearance in the forest, while Celia and Touchstone are complaining of mere bodily exhaustion. And then, in spite of her fatigue, she is all attention to the dialogue between Corin and Sylvius :

Alas, poor shepherd, searching of thy wound,
I have by hard adventure found mine own.

Jove! Jove! this shepherd's passion

Is much upon my fashion!

Their finding of the verses in her praise hung and carved upon the trees, and Celia's discovering of Orlando himself as their author, still wearing Rosalind's chain upon his neck, give a new impulse and

vivacity to her feelings. Orlando's verses, too, we find, sustain the character given him by his elder brother, as one "never schooled, and yet learned; full of noble device;" and are peculiarly fitted to nourish the growing affection in the bosom of Rosalind— inspired, as she feels them to be, above all things, by a keen sense, in the writer, of the bright and tender grace and purity of soul which so exquisitely illumine her personal attractions. It is under the immediate impression of this delicate homage, that she overhears him, with her chain still upon his neck, avow and justify his passion to "the melancholy Jaques," and is thus encouraged to avail herself of her forester's disguise, to come forward and seek, in her own person, to draw from his lips a confirmation of the pleasing avowal.

From the very outset she turns the dialogue in that direction. When, in answer to her first question, he answers, "There's no clock in the forest," she replies immediately, "Then there is no true lover in the forest; else, sighing every minute, and groaning every hour, would detect the lazy foot of time, as well as a clock:" and to his rejoinder, " And why not the swift foot of time?" with what admirable readiness does she proceed to engage and fascinate his attention by her lively description of how "Time travels in divers paces with divers persons."

It should here be observed, that Orlando, in the first instance, suspects the seeming youth to be a brother of his mistress. When the duke afterwards observes to him,

I do remember in this shepherd boy

Some lively touches of my daughter's favour,

he answers,

My lord, the first time that I ever saw him,
Methought he was a brother to your daughter.

This shews us the drift of those questions of his which continue his first conversation with the disguised Rosalind from the point to which we have already

traced it:-"Where dwell you, pretty youth ?-Are you a native of this place?-Your accent is something finer than you could purchase in so removed a dwelling. How dexterously is her answer contrived, so as to make her very evasion of his enquiry lead Orlando directly to the subject of which her heart is full:

I have been told so of many: but, indeed, an old religious uncle of mine taught me to speak, who was in his youth an inland man; one that knew courtship too well, for there he fell in love. I have heard him read many lectures against it; and I thank God I am not a woman, to be touched with so many giddy offences as he hath generally taxed their whole sex withal. With equal readiness she converts the request, I pr'ythee, recount some of them," into an instrument for drawing the desired confession from the lips of her lover :

No; I will not cast away my physic but on those that are sick. There is a man haunts the forest, that abuses our young plants with carving Rosalind' on their barks; hangs odes upon hawthorns, and elegies on brambles; all, forsooth, deifying the name of Rosalind : if I could meet with that fancy-monger, I would give him some good counsel, for he seems to have the quotidian of love upon him.

This at once brings Orlando to the point:-"I am he that is so love-shaked. I pray you, tell me your remedy." And then, who does not see the pleasure with which, under her affected disbelief, she dwells on the contrast which Orlando's neatness of personal appearance presents to that of the more ordinary but less healthy kind of lover, "about whom everything demonstrates a careless desolation." "But you are no such man," she continues, "you are rather point-device in your accoutrements, as loving yourself, than seeming the lover of But her answer to other." any the assurance which Orlando returns, reveals to us sufficiently how little she is inclined to doubt the interesting fact:

Me believe it? You may as soon make her that you love believe it; which, I warrant, she is apter to do than to confess she does: that is one of the points in the which women still give the lie to their consciences.