When we pass from Jaques to Touchstone in "As You Like It," we have expelled that bitter drop which infused sadness into our vein, and the pulse resumes its hilarity. Jaques was not so well-tempered as the female celebrity of our day, who made it a rule, she said, when she heard any scandal of a friend, to hope for the best and believe the worst. Touchstone agrees substantially with Jaques in his views about court-fashions and social conventions, and says things quite as sharp; but he has the tone of genuine humor, and its good-nature never deserts him except when his legs do, as he takes that dispiriting journey into the forest of Arden. We should say that, for a man of his breeding, the clownish and ill-favored Audrey would overcome the most redoubtable temper; for we half believe with Jaques that his "loving voyage is but for two months victualled:" but he has no cynical suspicion. When he sees the sentimental plight of Rosalind, he merrily parodies it, and imagines an old flirtation of his with one Jane Smile; pretending to recollect that he wooed a peascod instead of her in her absence, from which he "took two cods, and, giving her them again, said with weeping tears, 'Wear these for my sake.'" Then he sums it all up with the tolerant reflection, "We, that are true lovers, run into strange capers; but as all is mortal in nature, so is all nature in love mortal in folly:" that is, Nature can be foolish in love, but the folly is mortal as all the things of Nature are, and will pass away leaving love behind. Therefore he'll have no jibes about it; and Rosalind justly replies, "Thou speak'st wiser than thou art 'ware of." In his quick answer to this, we detect the purpose of Shakspeare to keep the character ignorant of its own _naïveté_: "Nay, I shall ne'er be 'ware of mine own wit, till I break my shins against it." For humor is not so studiedly conscious of its own quality as irony and satire are. Jaques, meeting Orlando over ears deep in love, says ill-natured things to him, and invites him to a game of railing "against our mistress the world, and all our misery." The difference between his wit and Touchstone's is subtly indicated throughout the play, and is one of Shakspeare's most admirable studies in nature. Jaques marks the moment when the virtue of complete knowledge of the world passes into the vice of discontent. Touchstone expresses the gladness of being a member of this inevitable world, and of tolerating himself with the other fools. Thus all his strictures upon society have this superiority, that they cannot be suspected of hypocrisy and ill-will. Nothing is so depressing as the cynic's perpetual strain of undervaluing. It exhausts the heart like an air-bell; the feather of his irony no longer floats, but drops like lead to weigh us down with suspecting ourselves, and so dragging by that mood all the other people into a pitiful depreciation. We grow light again and rise buoyantly to the sunshiny surface when Touchstone