akers; it needs
but an average experience to discover that real life is full of just
such passages: what troubled and worried us yesterday made others
laugh then, and makes us laugh to-day: what we fret or grieve at in
the progress, we still smile and make merry over in the result.

AS YOU LIKE IT.

The Comedy of As You Like It was registered at the Stationers', in
London, on the 4th of August, 1600. Two other of Shakespeare's plays,
and one of Ben Jonson's, were entered at the same time; all of them
under an injunction, "to be stayed." In regard to the other two of
Shakespeare's plays, the stay appears to have been soon removed, as
both of them were entered again in the course of the same month, and
published before the end of that year. In the case of _As You Like
It_, the stay seems to have been kept up; perhaps because its
continued success on the stage made the theatrical company unwilling
to part with their interest in it.

This is the only contemporary notice of the play that has been
discovered. As it was not mentioned in the list given by Francis Meres
in 1598, we are probably warranted in presuming it had not been heard
of at that time. The play has a line, "Who ever lov'd, that lov'd not
at first sight?" apparently quoted from Marlowe's version of _Hero and
Leander_, which was published in 1598. So that we may safely conclude
the play to have been written some time between that date and the date
of the forecited entry at the Stationers'; that is, when the Poet was
in his thirty-sixth or thirty-seventh year. The play was never
printed, that we know of, till in the folio of 1623, where it stands
the tenth in the division of Comedies. The text is there presented in
a very satisfactory state, with but few serious errors, and none that
can fairly be called impracticable.

Before passing from this branch of the subject, perhaps I ought to
cite a curious piece of tradition, clearly pointing to the play in
hand. Gilbert Shakespeare, a brother of William, lived till after the
Restoration, which occurred in 1660; and Oldys tells us of "the faint,
general, and almost lost ideas" which the old man had, of having once
seen the Poet act a part in one of his own comedies; "wherein, being
to personate a decrepit old man, he wore a long beard, and appeared so
weak and drooping, that he was forced to be carried by another person
to a table, at which he was seated among some company who were eating,
and one of them sung