he has finished his wicked burlesque, of _Orlando_, the young master, carrying _Adam_, the old servant, upon his back. The song that immediately follows, sings true: “Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly.” But between the _all_ of _Jaques_ and the _most_ of the song, there is just the difference between earth and hell.--Of course, both from a literary and dramatic point of view, “The Seven Ages” is perfect. Now let us make one positive statement to balance the other: that wherever we find, in the mouth of a noble character, not stock sentiments of stage virtue, but appreciation of a truth which it needs deep thought and experience united with love of truth, to discover or verify for one’s self, especially if the truth be of a sort which most men will fail not merely to recognize as a truth, but to understand at all, because the understanding of it depends on the foregoing spiritual perception--then we think we may receive the passage as an expression of the inner soul of the writer. He must have seen it before he could have said it; and to see such a truth is to love it; or rather, love of truth in the general must have preceded and enabled to the discovery of it. Such a passage is the speech of the _Duke_, opening the second act of the play just referred to, “As You Like it.” The lesson it contains is, that the well-being of a man cannot be secured except he partakes of the ills of life, “the penalty of Adam.” And it seems to us strange that the excellent editors of the Cambridge edition, now in the course of publication--a great boon to all students of Shakspere--should not have perceived that the original reading, that of the folios, is the right one,-- “Here feel we _not_ the penalty of Adam?” which, with the point of interrogation supplied, furnishes the true meaning of the whole passage; namely, that the penalty of Adam is just what makes the “wood more free from peril than the envious court,” teaching each “not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think.” But Shakspere, although everywhere felt, is nowhere seen in his plays. He is too true an artist to show his own face from behind the play of life with which he fills his stage. What we can find of him there we must find by regarding the whole, and allowing the spiritual essence of the whole to find its way to our brain, and thence to our heart. The student of Shakspere becomes imbued with the idea of his character. It exhales from his writings. And when we have found the main drift of any play--the grand rounding of the whole--then by that we may interpret individual passages. It is alone in their relation to the whole that we can do them full justice, and in their relation to the whole that we discover the mind of the master.