represents the shady side of truth. The weakness of infancy, the pains of education, the woes of love, the dangers of glory, the pedantry of mature authority, the meanness of aged frugality, and the wretchedness of decay, these are the aspects of life given in brief sentences, each of which is like a picture in outline from the pencil of Retzsch, But life has another aspect: infancy has its pleasures of sense and its beauty; boyhood, its game and its fun ; love, its joys ; war, its glory; and age, its honourable worth. Only in the last scene of all, when decay and rottenness claim the yet living ruins of mind and body, is there no redeeming compensation ; “Last scene of all
That ends the strange eventful history, Is second childishness, and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.” But how few who start in life reach this melancholy part of
the course, more painful to behold perhaps than to endure. Infancy mewling and pewking, or crowing with laughter, is welcome and abundant as flowers in spring, but the living decay of second childhood is a prodigy. The delight which Jaques takes in the quaint humour of Touchstone is partly owing to the attraction which that singular compound of wit and folly has, for one whose curiosity to know all varieties of character is as keen as that of an antiquarian or a naturalist for some strange or new thing, and partly to the satire on human life expressed in the fool's sallies. Touchstone is second only in the aristocracy of Shakespeare's fools, subordinate only to him, hight of Lear, whose younger brother he might well be, more robustin health and coarse in humour, but with the self-same faculty of turning wisdom into folly and folly into wisdom, of levelling pretension by ridicule, and exposing the naked absurdity of false honour. The philosophy of folly is more broad, uncleanly, and rabe
