t-proved improbabilities, when the heart has been touched and the
fancy fascinated."

As a fitting pendent to this, I may further observe that the bringing
of lions, serpents, palm-trees, rustic shepherds, and banished
noblemen together in the Forest of Arden, is a strange piece of
geographical license, which certain critics have not failed to make
merry withal. Perhaps they did not see that the very grossness of the
thing proves it to have been designed. The Poet keeps his geography
true enough whenever he has cause to do so. He knew, at all events,
that lions did not roam at large in France. By this irregular
combination of actual things, he informs the whole with ideal effect,
giving to this charming issue of his brain "a local habitation and a
name," that it may link-in with our flesh-and-blood sympathies, and at
the same time turning it into a wild, wonderful, remote, fairy-land
region, where all sorts of poetical things may take place without the
slightest difficulty. Of course Shakespeare would not have done thus,
but that he saw quite through the grand critical humbug which makes
the proper effect of a work of art depend upon our belief in the
actual occurrence of the thing represented. But your "critic grave and
cool," I suppose, is one who, like Wordsworth's "model of a child,"

"Can string you names of districts, cities, towns,
The whole world over, tight as beads of dew
Upon a gossamer thread: he sifts, he weighs;
All things are put to question; he must live
Knowing that he grows wiser every day,
Or else not live at all, and seeing too
Each little drop of wisdom as it falls
Into the dimpling cistern of his heart,
O, give us once again the wishing-cap
Of Fortunatus, and the invisible coat
Of Jack the Giant-killer, Robin Hood,
And Sabra in the forest with Saint George!
The child, whose love is here, at least doth reap
One precious gain, that he forgets himself."

As far as I can determine the matter, _As You Like It_ is, upon the
whole, my favourite of Shakespeare's comedies. Yet I should be puzzled
to tell why; for my preference springs not so much from any
particular points or features, wherein it is surpassed by several
others, as from the general toning and effect. The whole is replete
with a beauty so delicate yet so intense, that we feel it everywhere,
but can never tell especially where it is, or in what it consists. For
instance, the descri