e remnants, at least, of a manly heart in him
have asserted their force in the shape of unselfish regards, strong as
life, for whatever is purest and loveliest in the characters about
him. He would rather starve or freeze, with Celia near him, than feed
high and lie warm where his eye cannot find her. If, with this fact in
view, our honest esteem does not go out towards him, then we, I think,
are fools in a worse sense than he is.

So much for the substantial manhood of Touchstone, and for the Poet's
human-heartedness in thus putting us in communication with it. As for
the other points of his character, I scarce know how to draw a reader
into them by any turn of analysis. Used to a life cut off from human
sympathies; stripped of the common responsibilities of the social
state; living for no end but to make aristocratic idlers laugh; one
therefore whom nobody heeds enough to resent or be angry at any thing
he says;--of course his habit is to speak all for effect, nothing for
truth: instead of reflecting the natural force and image of things,
his vocation is to wrest and transshape them from their true form and
pressure. Thus a strange wilfulness and whimsicality has wrought
itself into the substance of his mind. He takes nothing for what it is
in itself, but only for the odd quirks of thought he can twist out of
it. Yet his nature is not so "subdued to what it works in" but that,
amidst the scenes and inspirations of the Forest, the Fool quickly
slides into the man; the supervenings of the place so running into and
athwart what he brings with him, that his character comes to be as
dappled and motley as his dress. Even the new passion which there
overtakes him has a touch of his wilfulness in it: when he falls in
love, as he really does, nothing seems to inspire and draw him more
than the unloveliness of the object; thus approving that even so much
of nature as survives in him is not content to run in natural
channels.

* * * * *

Jaques is, I believe, an universal favourite, as indeed he well may
be, for he is certainly one of the Poet's happiest conceptions.
Without being at all unnatural, he has an amazing fund of peculiarity.
Enraptured out of his senses at the voice of a song; thrown into a
paroxysm of laughter at sight of the motley-clad and motley-witted
Fool; and shedding the twilight of his merry-sad spirit over all the
darker spots of human life and character; he represents the