e her thoughts run
brisk and glib even when grief has possession of her heart. Through
this interfusive power, her organs of play are held in perfect concert
with her springs of serious thought. Hence she is outwardly merry and
inwardly sad at the same time. We may justly say that she laughs out
her sadness, or plays out her seriousness: the sorrow that is swelling
her breast puts her wits and spirits into a frolic; and in the mirth
that overflows through her tongue we have a relish of the grief with
which her heart is charged. And our sympathy with her inward state is
the more divinely moved, forasmuch as she thus, with indescribable
delicacy, touches it through a masquerade of playfulness. Yet, beneath
all her frolicsomeness, we feel that there is a firm basis of thought
and womanly dignity; so that she never laughs away our respect.

It is quite remarkable how, in respect of her disguise, Rosalind just
reverses the conduct of Viola, yet with much the same effect. For,
though she seems as much at home in her male attire as if she had
always worn it, this never strikes us otherwise than as an exercise of
skill for the perfecting of her masquerade. And on the same principle
her occasional freedoms of speech serve to deepen our sense of her
innate delicacy; they being manifestly intended as a part of her
disguise, and springing from the feeling that it is far less
indelicate to go a little out of her character, in order to prevent
any suspicion of her sex, than it would be to hazard such a suspicion
by keeping strictly within her character. In other words, her free
talk bears much the same relation to her character as her dress does
to her person, and is therefore becoming to her even on the score of
feminine modesty.--Celia appears well worthy of a place beside her
whose love she shares and repays. Instinct with the soul of moral
beauty and female tenderness, the friendship of these more-than-sisters
"mounts to the seat of grace within the mind."

"We still have slept together;
Rose at an instant, learn'd, play'd, eat together;
And wheresoe'er we went, like Juno's swans,
Still we went coupled and inseparable."

The general drift and temper, or, as some of the German critics would
say, the ground-idea of this play, is aptly hinted by the title. As
for the beginnings of what is here represented, these do not greatly
concern us; most of them lie back out of our view, and the rest are
soon