and the prosperous to look with contempt upon the wretched, is to him not a source of hatred, but of sorrow.
“Most invectively he pierceth thro' The body of the country, city, court,”— but his invectives are half erased with tears. Jaques melancholy is no affectation, though he “loves it better than laughing,” “and can suck it out of a song, as a weazel sucks eggs.” Although his intimate knowledge of mankind, and his sententious power of expression, and his perverse ingenuity in representing things awry, make his company an intellectual feast, so that the Duke says, “I love to cope him in these sullen fits, For then he's full of matter,”
he feels no vain pleasure in the display, and avoids the dispu tation and collision of wit which the Duke so much enjoys. “Jaq. I have been out all this day to avoid him. He is too disputable for my company; I think of as many matters as he, but I give heaven thanks, and make no boast of them.”
He is as far from being unsocial as he is from being really
misanthropic. He delights in the gay Amiens and his songs, though he does suck melancholy from them. He fancies Orlando, sees no fault in him, except “to be in love,” and invites his companionship “to rail against our mistress the world and all our misery.” He almost solicits friendship with Rosalind; but to Touchstone he cleaves as to a grotesque image of his own thoughts. There is no trace in him of that terrible selfishness which distinguishes melancholy when it has become disease.
The sensual sources of selfishness have been
dried up in him; and the intellectual ones are frozen by his in grain cynicism. He is more disposed to solitude than disputa tion, to silence than intellectual display, seeing that “’tis good to be sad and say nothing.” The most subtle of all vanities, that of mental power, is absent, and the two or three long
