Page:As You Like It (1919) Yale.djvu/72

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are you he that hangs the verses on the trees,

wherein Rosalind is so admired?

Orl. I swear to thee, youth, by the white

hand of Rosalind, I am that he, that unfor-

tunate he.

Ros. But are you so much in love as your

rimes speak?

Orl. Neither rime nor reason can express

how much.

Ros. Love is merely a madness, and, I tell

you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip

as madmen do; and the reason why they are

not so punished and cured is, that the lunacy is

so ordinary that the whippers are in love too.

Yet I profess curing it by counsel.

Orl. Did you ever cure any so?

Ros. Yes, one; and in this manner. He was

to imagine me his love, his mistress; and I set

him every day to woo me: at which time would

I, being but a moonish youth, grieve, be effemi-

nate, changeable, longing and liking; proud,

fantastical, apish, shallow, inconstant, full of

tears, full of smiles, for every passion something,

and for no passion truly anything, as boys and

women are, for the most part, cattle of this

colour; would now like him, now loathe him;

then entertain him, then forswear him; now

weep for him, then spit at him; that I drave my

suitor from his mad humour of love to a living

humour of madness, which was, to forswear the

full stream of the world, and to live in a nook

 427 dark whip; cf. n.

431 profess: claim to have knowledge of

434 set him: i.e., as a task

436 moonish: variable

438 fantastical: capricious

apish: imitative

443 entertain: receive

forswear: renounce

445 living madness: humor of actual madness 