Page:William Hazlitt - Characters of Shakespear's Plays (1817).djvu/340

310 for his own melancholy and his satirical vein, and the well-known speech on the stages of human life, the old song of "Blow, blow, thou winter's wind," Rosalind's description of the marks of a lover and of the progress of time with different persons, the picture of the snake wreathed round Oliver's neck while the lioness watches her sleeping prey, and Touchstone's lecture to the shepherd, his defence of cuckolds, and panegyric on the virtues of "an If."—All of these are familiar to the reader: there is one passage of equal delicacy and beauty which may have escaped him, and with it we shall close our account of. It is Phebe's description of Ganimed at the end of the third act.

"Think not I love him, tho' I ask for him; Tis but a peevish boy, yet he talks well;— But what care I for words! yet words do well, When he that speaks them pleases those that hear: It is a pretty youth; not very pretty; But sure he's proud, and yet his pride becomes him; He'll make a proper man; the best thing in him Is his complexion; and faster than his tongue Bid make offence, his eye did heal it up: He is not very tall, yet for his years he's tall; His leg is but so so, and yet 'tis well; There was a pretty redness in his lip, A little riper, and more lusty red Than that mix'd in his cheek; 'twas just the difference