like the old Robin Hood of England: they say many young gentlemen flock to him every day, and fleet the time carelessly, as they did in the golden world. 125 OLI. What, you wrestle to-morrow before the new duke? CHA. Marry, do I, sir; and I came to acquaint you with a matter. I am given, sir, secretly to understand that your younger brother, Orlando, hath a disposition to come in disguised against me to try a fall: To-morrow, sir, I wrestle for my credit; and he that escapes me without some broken limb shall acquit him well. Your brother is but young, and tender; and, for your love, I would be loth to foil him, as I must, for my own honour, if he come in therefore, out of my love for you, I came hither to acquaint you withal; that either you might stay him from his intendment, or brook such disgrace well as he shall run into; in that it is a thing of his own search, and altogether against my will. 142

OLI. Charles, I thank thee for thy love to me, which thou shalt find I will most kindly requite. I had myself notice of my brother's purpose herein, and have by underhand means laboured to dissuade him from it; but he is resolute. I'll tell thee, Charles, it is the stubbornest young fellow of France; full of ambition, an envious emulator of every man's good parts, a secret and villainous contriver against me his natural brother; therefore use thy discretion; I had as lief thou didst break his neck

122

Old Robin Hood. See Thierry's Norman Conquest, book 10, and the Robin Hood ballads in Percy's Reliques, or in the Elegant Extracts.

125

The golden world. The golden age.

136. To foil him. From the French fouler,' to trample, which gives the notion of the completest possible defeat.

140 To brook. Literally 'to employ,' (German, 'brauchen.') 149 An envious emulator. The word 'emulate' ('a most emulate pride') and its cognates are used by Shakspere in a bad sense; as in Jul. Cæsar, Act ii. Sc. 3.

"Virtue cannot live

Out of the teeth of emulation."

152 As lief. The use of this word will be seen in the following passages quoted by Horne Tooke (Diversions of Purley, p. 262)—

"And let no thyng to thee be lefe

Which to another man is grefe."-GOWER.

as his finger: And thou wert best look to 't; for if thou dost him any slight disgrace, or if he do not mightily grace himself on thee, he will practise against thee by poison, entrap thee by some treacherous device, and never leave thee till he hath ta'en thy life by some indirect means or other: for, I assure thee, and almost, with tears I speak it, there is not one so young and so villainous this day living. I speak but brotherly of him; but, should I anatomize him to thee as he is, I must blush and weep, and thou must look pale and wonder. 164

CHA. I am heartily glad I came hither to you: If he come to-morrow I'll give him his payment: If ever he go alone again I'll never wrestle for prize more: And so, God keep your worship. [Exit.

OLI. Farewell, good Charles.-Now will I stir this gamester: I hope I shall see an end of him; for my soul, yet I know not why, hates nothing more than he. Yet he's gentle; never schooled and yet learned; full of noble device; of all sorts enchantingly beloved; and, indeed, so much in the heart of the world, and especially of my own people who best know him, that I am altogether misprised: but it shall not be so long; this wrestler shall clear all:

"Ye that to me (quod she) full lever were

Than all the good the sunne about gothe."-Chaucer. "Three pointes which, I fynde,

Ben levest unto man's kynde."-Gower.

162 Brotherly. With a brother's reserve.

170 This gamester, this athlete.'

The word is still used for

a single-stick player, as, conversely, in America the word 'sportsman' means 'a gambler.'

172 Yet he's gentle. This rather strange admission may be, as Coleridge suggests, the thought of a tyrannic will, setting morality purposely at nought, and placing obstacles in a clear light, that it may spurn them away. In this case it would be like Edmund's speaking of Edgar's nobleness (King Lear, i. 2), Iago of Othello's 'free and open nature,' in Act i. Sc. 3, and the King of Hamlet's, in iv. 7. But, perhaps, this is over-refining. Duke Frederick in Sc. 3 is to complain of Rosalind as charming the people by her patient grace, and Oliver's saying the same of Orlando here brings out the parallelism of the lovers' fortunes.

177 Misprised. From minus pretiare,' as the Spanish 'menospreciar' shews. On the double origin of the prefix'mis,' see Diez' and Wedgwood's Dictionaries.

nothing remains but that I kindle the boy thither, which

now I'll go about.

[Exit. 180

SCENE II.—A Lawn before the Duke's Palace.

Enter ROSALIND and CELIA.

CEL. I pray thee, Rosalind, sweet my coz, be merry. Ros. Dear Celia, I show more mirth than I am mistress of; and would you yet I were merrier? Unless you could teach me to forget a banished father, you must not learn me how to remember any extraordinary pleasure. 7

CEL. Herein I see thou lov'st me not with the full weight that I love thee: if my uncle, thy banished father, had banished thy uncle, the duke, my father, so thou hadst been still with me I could have taught my love to take thy father for mine; so wouldst thou, if the truth of thy love to me were so righteously tempered as mine is to thee.

15

Ros. Well, I will forget the condition of my estate, to rejoice in yours.

CEL. You know my father hath no child but I, nor none is like to have; and, truly, when he dies thou shalt be his heir: for what he hath taken away from thy father, perforce, I will render thee again in affection; by mine honour I will; and when I break that oath let me turn monster: therefore, my sweet Rose, my dear Rose, be merry. 25 Ros. From henceforth I will, coz, and devise sports: let me see; what think you of falling in love?

CEL. Marry, I prithee do, to make sport withal; but

179 Kindle the boy thither. Excite him to the enterprise. (So Macbeth, i. 3, "enkindle you unto the crown.") Shakspere judiciously omits the arguments (which are given at length by Lodge), because the reasons which persuade Orlando are stated with touching force by himself in the next scene.

18 No child but I. The nominative is κarà σúveσw, for ‘I am my father's only child.' In Cymb. v. 5, 343, the accusative is so

"Beaten for loyalty

Excited me to treason.'

for I was excited to treason.'

29 To make sport withal. This emphatic form of 'with' generally, as here, governs relatives expressed or understood.

love no man in good earnest; nor no further in sport neither, than with safety of a pure blush thou mayst in honour come off again.

Ros. What shall be our sport then?

CEL. Let us sit and mock the good housewife, Fortune, from her wheel, that her gifts may henceforth be bestowed equally.

Ros. I would we could do so; for her benefits are mightily misplaced: and the bountiful blind woman doth most mistake in her gifts to women.

38

CEL. 'Tis true: for those that she makes fair she scarce makes honest; and those that she makes honest she makes very ill favouredly.

Ros. Nay, now thou goest from fortune's office to nature's fortune reigns in gifts of the world, not in the lineaments of nature.

Enter TOUCHSTONE.

CEL. No? When nature hath made a fair creature, may she not by fortune fall into the fire? Though nature hath given us wit to flout at fortune, hath not fortune sent in this fool to cut off the argument?

50 Ros. Indeed, there is fortune too hard for nature; when

31 A pure blush. A blush and no more.

34 Mock Fortune from her wheel. As a good housewife has a spinning-wheel, so Fortune has a wheel of a different kind.

35 Bestowed equally-with the comic results brought out so strongly in the Plutus of Aristophanes.

42 From Fortune's office. 'Away from fortune's office to that of nature.' Shakspere constantly harps on the motive powers of human action; nature, destiny, chance, art, custom. In this place he playfully distinguishes nature from chance; in Winter's Tale, Act iv. Sc. 3, he argues that the resources of art are themselves gifts of nature :

"Nature still is bettered by no mean

But nature made that mean.

In Macbeth, i. 3, he shows that destiny can work itself without our help ("if chance will have me king, why, chance may crown me"), and in Hamlet, iii. 4, 161, he splendidly exhibits the force of custom in almost changing the stamp of nature.'

45 When nature hath made a fair creature. True that fortune does not make fair features; but she can mar them by some accident. So nature makes us able to philosophize, chance spoils our grave philosophy by sending us a fool.

fortune makes nature's natural the cutter off of nature's wit.

CEL. Peradventure, this is not fortune's work, neither, but nature's; who perceiving our natural wits too dull to reason of such goddesses, hath sent this natural for our whetstone: for always the dulness of the fool is the whetstone of the wits.-How now, wit? whither wander you? TOUCH. Mistress, you must come away to your father. CEL. Were you made the messenger? 62 TOUCH. No, by mine honour; but I was bid to come for you.

Ros. Where learned you that oath, fool?

TOUCH. Of a certain knight, that swore by his honour they were good pancakes, and swore by his honour the mustard was naught: now I'll stand to it, the pancakes were naught, and the mustard was good; and yet was not the knight forsworn.

71

CEL. How prove you that, in the great heap of your knowledge?

Ros. Ay, marry; now unmuzzle your wisdom.

TOUCH. Stand you both forth now: stroke your chins, and swear by your beards that I am a knave.

CEL. By our beards, if we had them, thou art.

TOUCH. By my knavery, if I had it, then I were: but if you swear by that that is not, you are not forsworn: no more was this knight, swearing by his honour, for he never had any; or, if he had, he had sworn it away before ever he saw those pancakes or that mustard.

CEL. Prithee, who is 't that thou mean'st?

TOUCH. One that old Frederick, your father, loves. CEL. My father's love is enough to honour him enough: speak no more of him; you'll be whipped for taxation, one of these days.

91

TOUCH, The more pity, that fools may not speak wisely, what wise men do foolishly.

57 Our whetstone. Or, perhaps on the other hand, good mother Nature thinks us so dull, that she sends us her 'natural' to sharpen our wits. Natural' appears to be an abridgment of 'natural born idiot.' "I am sometimes," says Manes in Lilly's Campaspe, "in such a vein that, for want of some dull pate to work upon, I begin to gird (jibe at) myself."

91 Taxation. Slander. See King Lear, i. 4, 123, note, where the identity of 'task' and 'tax' is shewn.