for it, 'save ceremony,' and cannot sleep so soundly as the vacant-minded slave. So the Spanish minister is said to have told the king: 'Your Majesty is but a ceremony,' an essential part, indeed, of the framework of the State, but not superior in personal happiness to the ordinary human being.
That, it seems to me, points to the most obvious solution of the supposed contrast between the man and the author. Nobody was more keenly alive to every variety of enjoyment, or more capable of sympathising with the passions and ambitions of all the amazingly vigorous life that was going on around him. He can be poet and lover and sportsman, a boon companion, and watch the great game that is played in the court or in the wars. He can act as they come every part in Jaques' famous speech, always with an eye to the end of the strange, eventful history; take everything as it comes, and yet ask, 'What is it worth?' Never forget, he seems to have replied, that life is very short, and man very small, and the pleasure of each stage in it always has drawbacks, and will disappear altogether as the powers decline. And by the time you are fifty it will be well to have a comfortable little place of your own
