"Who could be out, [of matter for conversation] being before his beloved mistress?"

Rosalind replies, with a gross perversion of his phrase,

"Marry, that should you, if I were your mistress; or I should think my honesty ranker than my wit."

In Act V. Sc. 2, speaking to Orlando of Oliver and Celia, she says:—

"in these degrees have they made a pair of stairs to marriage, which they will climb incontinent, or else be incontinent before marriage."

Is the woman who speaks thus, the more or the less indelicate when she owns her hope that she shall be made a wife and a mother by the man she loves. But more :—her cousin Celia, who is much the more retiring of the two, when asked by Rosalind, in Act III. Sc. 2, to take the cork out of her mouth that Rosalind may drink her tidings, makes an answer for which I prefer referring the reader to the text.

In reading the Winter's Tale shortly after As You Like It, I noticed that Perdita, one of Shakespeare's purest and most lovely creations, she, too, who makes the requestunusual with the women of Shakespeare's day-that Autolycus may be forewarned to use "no scurrilous words in his tunes," expresses the same thought which Coleridge calls "a most indelicate anticipation." In Act IV. Sc. 3, when Polixenes urges her to cultivate "gillivors" in her garden, her lover being by, she thus expresses her dislike of their artificial formation :

"I'll not put

The dibble in the earth to set one slip of them;
No more than, were I painted, I should wish

This youth to say 'twere well; and only therefore
Desire to breed by me."

Again, in the same Scene, we find her expressing an idea even more foreign to our notions of delicacy, because not embodying the idea of maternity; though, strangely enough, this last deficiency may possibly be thought a gain She speaks of strewing her lover with flowers. "What! like a corse?" She answers:

by some. He asks,

"No, like a bank, for love to lie and play on;

Not like a corpse: or if,-not to be buried,
But quick, [that is, living] and in mine arms."

These instances occurred to me immediately after meeting with the passage on which Theobald, Coleridge and Mr. Knight have commented. Were Shakespeare to be searched, such speeches might be found by dozens in the mouths of his female characters, for instance, the reply of Beatrice to Don Pedro about her putting down Benedick. [Much Ado, &c., Act II. Sc. 2.] The custom of his day permitted them, even in the ordinary intercourse of society; and they were expected on the stage, where, it should be remembered, they were actually uttered, not by women, but by men.

I must own that I cannot see any thing intrinsically immodest in Rosalind's speech as the original gives it to us; and that I find it decidedly in keeping with Shakespeare's mode of treating the female character. Neither do I find any thing intrinsically indelicate in Perdita's speeches. They are not forced, but are, as is also Rosalind's, the expression of feelings natural to the female mind, when under the influence of a love which is any thing more than sickly sentimentality; and the feelings being such, the expression of them cannot be justly considered indelicate, considering the manners of the time when Shakespeare wrote.

The jests of Rosalind and Celia, however, are decidedly and intrinsically indelicate, and would be so in any age,because they are jests: the idea is brought in for the mere sake of a joke upon a forbidden subject. To allude to the relations of the sexes and their consequences, needlessly, and in a manner which calls attention to their forbidden nature, must ever be immodest; to do so necessarily, honestly and simply, can never be justly so considered.

I have noticed this passage at some length, because the comments which change the text of the original, and call forth my remarks, encourage the spurious modesty too prevalent already, as it seems to me. Better even the blunt, coarse honesty and obtruded knowledge of the relations of sex which prevailed in Elizabeth's day, than the affected and spurious delicacy of 1850, which awakens more attention, provokes more thought, and shows more consciousness. But best-a simple and direct utterance of that which is needful, and an ample knowledge of that which is inevitable in such matters, guided by a modesty springing from within, rather than a propriety imposed from without. Nevertheless, such modesty will always forbid its possessor to trespass needlessly beyond the bounds of the conventional propriety of the day. The idea of trespass is incon

sistent with modesty.

But, whatever may be the abstract merits of the question, in regulating Shakespeare's text we must be guided, not by what we think, or by the public sentiment of our day, but by what he thought, if we can discover it; and it so happens that he has left us his own explicit testimony that he did not think it immodest or indelicate for a maiden to wish to be called mother by the children of the man she loves, even when he does not love her. In his Sonnets, addressed to that mysterious youth whom he urges to marry, not only does he say,

"For where is she so fair, whose unear'd womb
Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry?"

Sonnet III.

but in a subsequent address, he thus breaks forth:

“Now stand you on the top of happy hours;

And many maiden gardens, yet unset,

With virtuous wish would bear you living flowers,
Much liker than your painted counterfeit."

Note first that glorious first line. It is almost equal to

"jocund day

Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain top."

And yet Steevens could sneer at Shakespeare's sonnets! But, to return to the subject,-see that Shakespeare not only makes blooming maidens wish to bear living flowers to his friend, but that he sets aside all cavil at the character of their desire by explicitly saying, that, in his estimation, they did this with "virtuous wish." The names of Rowe, Coleridge, and Mr. Knight, are entitled to respect; but when Shakespeare's own testimony is against them, they must go to the wall; and Mr. Collier's anonymous folio corrector, who thought with them, must of course go with them.

It certainly merits remark, that if the alleged error were the result of a printer's transposition of the words 'father's' and 'child,' as the advocates of the new reading claim, the line would have appeared,

"No, some of it is for my child fatheres,"

instead of,

"No, some of it is for my childes father;"

which is the reading of the first folio.

The melancholy Jaques grieves at that;

And, in that kind, swears you do more usurp
Than doth your brother that hath banish'd you.
To day, my lord of Amiens, and myself,
Did steal behind him, as he lay along

Under an oak, whose antique root peeps out
Upon the brook that brawls along this wood:
To the which place a poor sequester'd stag,
That from the hunter's aim had ta'en a hurt,
Did come to languish; and, indeed, my lord,
The wretched animal beav'd forth such groans,
That their discharge did stretch his leathern coat
Almost to bursting; and the big round tears
Cours'd one another down his innocent nose
In piteous chase; and thus the hairy fool,
Much marked of the melancholy Jaques,
Stood on the extremest verge of the swift brook,
Augmenting it with tears.

Duke S.

But what said Jaques ? Did he not moralize this spectacle?

1 Lord. O, yes, into a thousand similes. First, for his weeping in the needless stream; Poor deer, quoth he, thou mak'st a testament As wordlings do, giving thy sum of more

To that which had too much: Then being alone, Left and abandon'd of his velvet friends;

'Tis right, quoth he; this misery doth part

The flux of company: Anon, a careless herd,
Full of the pasture, jumps along by him,

And never stays to greet him; Ay, quoth Jaques,
Sweep on, you fat and greasy citizens;
'Tis just the fashion: Wherefore do you look
Upon that poor and broken bankrupt there?
Thus most invectively he pierceth through
The body of country, city, court,-

Yea, and of this our life; swearing, that we
Are mere usurpers, tyrants, and what's worse,
To fright the animals, and to kill them up,
In their assign'd and native dwelling-place.