which underlie and outlast all the flitting
specialties of mode and custom,--

"Truths that wake, to perish never;
Which neither listlessness nor mad endeavour,
Nor Man nor Boy,
Nor all that is at enmity with joy,
Can utterly abolish or destroy."

_As You Like It_ is exceedingly rich and varied in character. The
several persons stand out round and clear in themselves, yet their
distinctive traits in a remarkable degree sink quietly into the
feelings without reporting themselves in the understanding; for which
cause the clumsy methods of criticism are little able to give them
expression. Subtile indeed must be the analysis that should reproduce
them to the intellect without help from the Dramatic Art.

Properly speaking, the play has no hero; for, though Orlando occupies
the foreground, the characters are mainly co-ordinate; the design of
the work precluding any subordination among them. Diverted by fortune
from all their cherished plans and purposes, they pass before us in
just that moral and intellectual dishabille which best reveals their
indwelling graces of mind and heart. Schlegel remarks that "the Poet
seems to have aimed, throughout, at showing that nothing is wanting,
to call forth the poetry that has its dwelling in Nature and the human
mind, but to throw off all artificial restraint, and restore both to
their native liberty." This is well said; but it should be observed
withal that the persons have already been "purified by suffering"; and
that it was under the discipline of social restraint that they
developed the virtues which make them go right without such restraint,
as indeed they do, while we are conversing with them. Because they
have not hitherto been altogether free to do as they would, therefore
it is that they are good and beautiful in doing as they have a mind
to now. Let us beware of attributing to Nature, as we call it, that
goodness which proceeds from _habits_ generated under Gospel culture
and the laws of Christian society. After all, the ordinary conditions
of social and domestic life give us far more than they take away. It
requires a long schooling in the _prescriptions_ of order and
rectitude, to fit us for being left to ourselves. In some sense indeed
it is a great enlargement of liberty to be rid of all the loves and
duties and reverences which the Past may have woven about us; and many
there are who seem to place freedom of mind in having nothing to look