It may be thought that some of the points here brought out are of the nature of conceits, in which fanciful, and sometimes merely verbal contrasts, are exhibited between the delights of the country and the troubles or vanities of the world. Yet surely the images and ideas introduced are beautiful and pleasing, and are neither forced nor far fetched. There are, we conceive, moods of feeling in which trains of thought of this precise character are naturally suggested to the mind; and no occasion is more favourable for such contemplations than when the comparison here drawn is instituted by those who, dissatisfied with their experience of artificial life, are enjoying, in all its freshness, the pleasures of a change to nature and simplicity. No strong passions are at work, in such a situation, to fix the feelings and imagination on some great and engrossing object. The heart is light and at ease, and the fancy is at liberty to sport with the successive images that attract its attention, and to exert even some ingenuity in moulding them to suit its favourite inclination. Such, though more fantastic and querulous, was the spirit in which the melancholy Jacques moralised, by the river's side, the spectacle of the sobbing deer into a thousand similies, and found in it matter for invective against all the modes of human life.
Let us add, from Wotton, another of Raleigh's or Ignoto's moralities, which is more in Jacques's vein, though, if it was written posterior to As You Like it, we may think that it might as well have been let alone.
DE MORTE.
"Man's life's a tragedy: his mother's womb
(From which he enters) is the tiring room;
This spacious earth the theatre; and the stage
That country which he lives in: Passions, Rage,
Folly, and Vice are actors. The first cry
The prologue to the ensuing tragedy.
The former act consisteth of dumb shows;
The second, he to more perfection grows;
I' th' third, he is a Man, and doth begin
To nurture vice, and act the deeds of sin:
I' th fourth, declines; i' th' fifth, diseases clog
And trouble him; then Death's his epilogue."
Another speaker follows on the same side, whose voice, if it were genuine, would be worth listening to. The verses now to be quoted bear, in the Reliquiœ, the signature of Francis Lord Bacon, though we do not remember that any poetry has ever found admission into his collected works, except some translations of psalms. What we are here to give is not very poetical, and would scarcely turn the balance against the prose wisdom of one of the immortal Essays, Civil and Moral. Perhaps, however, these lines have some touches characteristic of their nominal author, and would, at least, hold a respectable place in any anthology gathered from the effusions of lawyers or lord chancellors. They are obviously copied from some of the Greek epigrams on the same subject.
THE WORLD.
"The world's a bubble: and the life of man
Less than a span.
In his conception wretched; from the womb,
So to the tomb.
Nurst from his cradle, and brought up to years
With cares and fears.
Who then to frail mortality shall trust,
But limns on water, or but writes on dust.
"Yet, whilst with sorrow here we live opprest,
What life is best?
Courts are but only superficial schools,
To dandle fools:
