And Celia replies,—­

    “He’ll go along o’er the wide world with me: 
    Leave me alone to woo him.”

Where we learn that some remnants, at least, of a manly heart in him have asserted their force in the shape of unselfish regards, strong as life, for whatever is purest and loveliest in the characters about him.  He would rather starve or freeze, with Celia near him, than feed high and lie warm where his eye cannot find her.  If, with this fact in view, our honest esteem does not go out towards him, then we, I think, are fools in a worse sense than he is.

So much for the substantial manhood of Touchstone, and for the Poet’s human-heartedness in thus putting us in communication with it.  As for the other points of his character, I scarce know how to draw a reader into them by any turn of analysis.  Used to a life cut off from human sympathies; stripped of the common responsibilities of the social state; living for no end but to make aristocratic idlers laugh; one therefore whom nobody heeds enough to resent or be angry at any thing he says;—­of course his habit is to speak all for effect, nothing for truth:  instead of reflecting the natural force and image of things, his vocation is to wrest and transshape them from their true form and pressure.  Thus a strange wilfulness and whimsicality has wrought itself into the substance of his mind.  He takes nothing for what it is in itself, but only for the odd quirks of thought he can twist out of it.  Yet his nature is not so “subdued to what it works in” but that, amidst the scenes and inspirations of the Forest, the Fool quickly slides into the man; the supervenings of the place so running into and athwart what he brings with him, that his character comes to be as dappled and motley as his dress.  Even the new passion which there overtakes him has a touch of his wilfulness in it:  when he falls in love, as he really does, nothing seems to inspire and draw him more than the unloveliness of the object; thus approving that even so much of nature as survives in him is not content to run in natural channels.

* * * * *

Jaques is, I believe, an universal favourite, as indeed he well may be, for he is certainly one of the Poet’s happiest conceptions.  Without being at all unnatural, he has an amazing fund of peculiarity.  Enraptured out of his senses at the voice of a song; thrown into a paroxysm of laughter at sight of the motley-clad and motley-witted Fool; and shedding the twilight of his merry-sad spirit over all the darker spots of human life and character; he represents the abstract and sum-total of an utterly useless yet perfectly harmless man, seeking wisdom by abjuring its first principle.  An odd choice mixture of reality and affectation, he does nothing but think, yet avowedly thinks to no purpose; or rather thinking is with him its own end.  On the whole, if in Touchstone there is much of the philosopher in the Fool, in Jaques there is not less of the fool in the philosopher; so that the German critic, Ulrici, is not so wide of the mark in calling them “two fools.”