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been banished from the court-they each enter into the pastoral life with all imaginable prettiness; and there in the forest wild they encounter native pastoral lovers, and a dethroned king and his free companions leading the hunter's life without care or retrospection. Alinda and Rosalynd have now become Aliena and Ganimede; and when they sojourn in the forest they find the verses of despairing shepherds graven upon tall beech-trees, and hear interminable eclogues recited between Montanus and Coridon. Again, when Rosader and Adam enter the forest, and in their extremity of distress encounter the merry company of banished courtiers, we have the exact prototype of the action of Orlando and Adam of Shakspere.

Exact, also, is the resemblance between the Rosader of Lodge, wandering about, and carving on a tree, “a pretty estimate of his mistress's perfections," and the Orlando of Shakspere, who in the same way records

"The fair, the chaste, the unexpressive she."

Far different, however, is the characterisation arising out of these similar circumstances. The faithful old Adam, the earnest Orlando, the witty Rosalind, of Shakspere, are living realities formed out of Lodge's vague shadows. Shakspere follows Lodge, with scarcely a deviation, in the conduct of his story. We have the same incidents of the elder brother's exile, his rescue from a savage beast by the courage of the brother he had injured,—and his passion for the banished daughter of the usurping king. We have, of course, the same discovery of Rosalind to her father, and the same happy marriage of the princesses with their lovers, as well as that of the coy shepherdess with her shepherd. The catastrophe, however, is different. The usurping king of Lodge comes out with a mighty army to fight his rebellious peers,—when the sojourners in the forest join the battle, the usurper is slain, and the rightful king restored. Shakspere manages the matter after a milder fashion; the conversion of the Duke Frederick, by an old religious man.

Dr. Johnson seems to think that Shakspere should have given a dialogue between the usurper and the hermit, for the purpose of exhibiting a moral lesson." This was surely

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unnecessary; for there is, perhaps, no play more full of real moral lessons than 'As You Like It.' They are to be collected out of the philosophy which presides over the conduct of his action and the development of his characters. What in Lodge was a pastoral replete with quaintness, and antithesis, and pedantry, and striving after effect, becomes in Shakspere an imaginative drama, in which the real is blended with the poetical in such intimate union, that the highest poetry appears to be as essentially natural as the most familiar gossip; and the loftiest philosophy is interwoven with the occurrences of every-day life, so as to teach us that there is a philosophical aspect of the commonest things. It is this spirit which informs his forest of Arden with such life, and truth, and beauty, as belongs to no other representation of pastoral scenes; which takes us into the depths of solitude, and shows us how the feelings of social life alone can give us

66 'tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones, and good in everything;"

which builds a throne for intellect "under the greenwood tree," and there, by characteristic satire, gently indicates to us the vanity of the things that bind us to the world; whilst it teaches us that life has its happiness in the cultivation of the affections,-in content and independence of spirit. It was by a process such as this that the novel of Lodge was changed into the comedy of Shakspere.

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