Page:The Psychology of Shakespeare.pdf/250

Rh speeches he makes are but the spontaneous expression of his contemplation. If this contemplation paints itself in sad colours, it is singularly free from personal animosity. This is finely expressed in his reply to the accusation of the Duke, that he would commit sin in chiding sin. “Jaq. Why, who cries out on pride, That can therein tax any private party 2 Doth it not flow as hugely as the sea,

Till that the very weary means do ebb 2 What woman in the city do I name, When that I say, The city-woman bears The cost of princes on unworthy shoulders ?"— The motive for this general censure of vice is, indeed, as wide apart from that of individual slander, as benevolence is from malice. The tenderest love of which the world's history bears record, denounced and unsparingly lashed all vice, but the woman taken in adultery was told to “go and sin no more.”

The Duke always appears unduly severe in his estimate of Jaques' humour. He has accused him of “sullen fits,” of being “compact of jars,” of deriving his disgust of life from used up libertinism ; and after Orlando's famishing appeal for pity and sustenance, he does him the injustice to refer the cause of his sadness to the feeling of personal misery. “Duke S. Thou seest, we are not all alone unhappy : This wide and universal theatre

Presents more woeful pageants than the scene Wherein we play in.” Jaques replies in that epitome of life in twenty-eight lines, describing the seven ages of man, the condensed wisdom of which has become “familiar as household words.”

It affords

a complete, though indirect refutation to the Duke's implied reproach, and distinctly lays the wide basis of his philosophy on human life at large. It is to be remarked that there is neither anger normalice in this description of life. It merely