It is quite remarkable how, in respect of her disguise, Rosalind just reverses the conduct of Viola, yet with much the same effect.  For, though she seems as much at home in her male attire as if she had always worn it, this never strikes us otherwise than as an exercise of skill for the perfecting of her masquerade.  And on the same principle her occasional freedoms of speech serve to deepen our sense of her innate delicacy; they being manifestly intended as a part of her disguise, and springing from the feeling that it is far less indelicate to go a little out of her character, in order to prevent any suspicion of her sex, than it would be to hazard such a suspicion by keeping strictly within her character.  In other words, her free talk bears much the same relation to her character as her dress does to her person, and is therefore becoming to her even on the score of feminine modesty.—­Celia appears well worthy of a place beside her whose love she shares and repays.  Instinct with the soul of moral beauty and female tenderness, the friendship of these more-than-sisters “mounts to the seat of grace within the mind.”

                  “We still have slept together;
    Rose at an instant, learn’d, play’d, eat together;
    And wheresoe’er we went, like Juno’s swans,
    Still we went coupled and inseparable.”

The general drift and temper, or, as some of the German critics would say, the ground-idea of this play, is aptly hinted by the title.  As for the beginnings of what is here represented, these do not greatly concern us; most of them lie back out of our view, and the rest are soon lost sight of in what grows out of them; but the issues, of which there are many, are all exactly to our mind; we feel them to be just about right, and would not have them otherwise.  For example, touching Frederick and Oliver, our wish is that they should repent, and repair the wrong they have done, in brief, that they should become good; which is precisely what takes place; and as soon as they do this, they naturally love those who were good before.  Jaques, too, is so fitted to moralize the discrepancies of human life, so happy and at home, and withal so agreeable, in that exercise, that we would not he should follow the good Duke when in his case those discrepancies are composed.  The same might easily be shown in respect of the other issues.  Indeed I dare ask any genial, considerate reader, Does not every thing turn out just as you like it?  Moreover there is an indefinable something about the play that puts us in a receptive frame of mind; that opens the heart, soothes away all querulousness and fault-finding, and makes us easy and apt to be pleased.  Thus the Poet here disposes us to like things as they come, and at the same time takes care that they shall come as we like.  The whole play indeed is as you like it.