Shakespeare generally preferred to make up his plots and stories out of such materials as were most familiar to his audience.  Of this we have many examples; but the fact is too well known to need dwelling upon.  Though surpassingly rich in fertility and force of invention, he was notwithstanding singularly economical and sparing in the use of it.  Which aptly shows how free he was from every thing like a sensational spirit or habit of mind.  Nature was every thing to him, novelty nothing, or next to nothing.  The true, not the new, was always the soul of his purpose; than which nothing could better approve the moral healthiness of his genius.  Hence, in great part, his noble superiority to the intellectual and literary fashions of his time.  He understood these perfectly; but he deliberately rejected them, or rather struck quite above or beyond them.  We rarely meet with any thing that savours of modishness in his workmanship.  Probably the best judgment ever pronounced upon him is Ben Jonson’s, “He was not of an age, but for all time.”  For even so it is with the permanences of our intellectual and imaginative being that he deals, and not with any transiencies of popular or fashionable excitement or pursuit.  And as he cared little for the new, so he was all the stronger in that which does not grow old, and which lives on from age to age in the perennial, unwithering freshness of Truth and Nature.  For the being carried hither and thither by the shifting mental epidemics of the day, what is it, after all, but a tacit confession of weakness or disease? proving, at the least, that one has not strength of mind enough to “feel the soul of Nature,” or to live at peace with the solidities of reason.  And because the attractions of mere novelty had no force with Shakespeare; because his mind dwelt far above the currents of intellectual fashion and convention; therefore his dramas stand “exempt from the wrongs of time”; and the study of them is, with but a single exception, just our best discipline in those forms and sources of interest which underlie and outlast all the flitting specialties of mode and custom,—­

“Truths that wake, to perish never;
Which neither listlessness nor mad endeavour,
Nor Man nor Boy,
Nor all that is at enmity with joy,
Can utterly abolish or destroy.”

As You Like It is exceedingly rich and varied in character.  The several persons stand out round and clear in themselves, yet their distinctive traits in a remarkable degree sink quietly into the feelings without reporting themselves in the understanding; for which cause the clumsy methods of criticism are little able to give them expression.  Subtile indeed must be the analysis that should reproduce them to the intellect without help from the Dramatic Art.