What think you of a world after that pattern? "As You Like it" is a vagabond play, and, verily, if there waved in any wind that blows a forest peopled like Arden's, with an exiled king drawing the sweetest, humanest lessons from misfortune; a melancholy Jacques, stretched by the river bank, moralising on the bleeding deer; a fair Rosalind, chanting her saucy cuckoo-song; fools like Touchstone--not like those of our acquaintance, my friends; and the whole place, from centre to circumference, filled with mighty oak bolls, all carven with lovers' names,--if such a forest waved in wind, I say, I would, be my worldly prospects what they might, pack up at once, and cast in my lot with that vagabond company. For there I should find more gallant courtesies, finer sentiments, completer innocence and happiness, more wit and wisdom, than I am like to do here even, though I search for them from shepherd's cot to king's palace. Just to think how those people lived! Carelessly as the blossoming trees, happily as the singing birds, time measured only by the patter of the acorn on the fruitful soil! A world without debtor or creditor, passing rich, yet with never a doit in its purse, with no sordid care, no regard for appearances; nothing to occupy the young but love-making, nothing to occupy the old but perusing the "sermons in stones" and the musical wisdom which dwells in "running brooks"! But Arden forest draws its sustenance from a poet's brain: the light that sleeps on its leafy pillows is "the light that never was on sea or shore." We but please and tantalise ourselves with beautiful dreams.