We see it too in the scene where he brings his wife into the Duke's company, with such an air of self-possession mixed with a pleased sense that she is his best joke at the punctilio of fashionable life. "An ill-favored thing, sir, but mine own; a poor humor of mine, sir, to take that that no man else will." Not so poor a humor; for humor itself does that, and adopts into the human family the outcasts who come between the wind and our nobility. "Rich honesty dwells like a miser, sir, in a poor house; as your pearl in your foul oyster." Then he amuses the Duke with a strain that runs into irony, because it has the semblance of being seriously meant, upon some other esteemed punctilios of the code of honor: he rallies the whole nicely graded scale of customs from the retort courteous to the lie direct, and nominates in order the degrees of the lie. But you may avoid even the lie direct with an _If_. "If you said so, then I said so." How many a quarrel on the platform and in the parlor has been stifled by this bolster of an _If_, and the parties quietly subside into a profounder dislike. The kind of marriages which the French call _de convenance_ get a wholesome rebuke from him; and the vulgarity of its terms is not wanton but highly apposite, as it is a part of the intended satire. It strips the matrimonial arrangement of its rhetoric, when he tells the shepherd that it is another simple sin in him to bring the incompatible members of his flock together, "out of all reasonable match. If thou be'st not damned for this, the devil himself will have no shepherds." He really imparts to you the surmise that the _mariages de convenance_ were appropriately derived by natural selection from the animal world. In fine, the Duke characterizes Touchstone well when he says, "He uses his folly like a stalking-horse; and under the presentation of that he shoots his wit." So hunters, who are seriously concerned to obtain food, work along towards their game behind a mimicry of it. And such a hunter for the soul of goodness, stalking it underneath the obvious beguilement, is the Humor of Shakspeare:-- "In good earnest, and so God mend me." FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 4: A clear trace of Shakspeare. Malvolio says, "A demure travel of regard," when he imagines the state-humor he will put on; and when he will send for Toby he expects to quench his familiar smile "with an austere regard of control." The "Twelfth Night" was first acted in February, 1602.] FALSTAFF: HIS COMPANIONS; AMERICANISMS. FALSTAFF.