It is perhaps more by the comment of the jester than by the conduct of the King’s daughters, that Lear has fully revealed to him his state of terrible destitution; and if it be not an old traditionary saying of some jester, the advice is admirably in the jester’s way, which shows that if a man would rise in the world, it were better for him to let go a descending wheel, and to hang to one going up-hill. The Yorick of _Hamlet_ is probably a reminiscence of an English jester. He had carried the young prince on his back a thousand times, and the childish cavalier had kissed the merriest of fellows often. These were common incidents in a family where there was a household fool. Yorick however poured a flagon of Rhenish on the head of the gravedigger; but an English joculator would have drunk off the wine, and broken the gravedigger’s head with the flagon. The whip was certainly ever present in the house that held an official Motley, in spite of the boasted license of speech supposed to be enjoyed by the latter. Touchstone is told that he shall be whipped for taxation. His qualities are, being able to string rhymes together in a butter-woman’s jog-trot pace to market; he has a memory for old verses; is full of smart sayings against the corrupt in fine linen, and has the faculty of making an honest calling seem uncleanly. He is a droll sort of philosopher, with a taste of the knave in him; and so far imitates the vices of his patrons, by being marvellously ready to seduce and betray. Rosalind tells him that he speaks wiser than he is aware, which a fool only seemed to do: it was part of his office. One of his happiest expressions has often been uttered by travellers who have gone abroad only to be disappointed: “Here am I in Arden. The more fool I! When I was at home, I was in a better place!” The Duke admirably describes a first-rate jester when he notices Touchstone as “swift and sententious,” and that he “wore his folly as a stalking-horse, and, under presentation of that, shoots his wit.” Touchstone too is a gentleman in his way, seeing that he has “undone three tailors!” The cynicism of the English fool is no doubt alluded to in _Timon of Athens_, where he is looked upon as a form of the old cynic philosopher, as indeed he was everywhere. To a sharp sentence of the fool, the churlish sage remarks, “That answer might have become Apemantas.”