Much has been said by one critic and another about the improbabilities in this play.  I confess they have never troubled me; and, as I have had no trouble here to get out of, I do not well know how to help others out.  Wherefore, if any one be still annoyed by these things, I will turn him over to the elegant criticism of the poet Campbell:  “Before I say more of this dramatic treasure, I must absolve myself by a confession as to some of its improbabilities.  Rosalind asks her cousin Celia, ‘Whither shall we go?’ and Celia answers, ’To seek my uncle in the Forest of Arden.’  But, arrived there, and having purchased a cottage and sheep-farm, neither the daughter nor niece of the banished Duke seem to trouble themselves much to inquire about either father or uncle.  The lively and natural-hearted Rosalind discovers no impatience to embrace her sire, until she has finished her masked courtship with Orlando.  But Rosalind was in love, as I have been with the comedy these forty years; and love is blind; for until a late period my eyes were never couched so as to see this objection.  The truth however is, that love is wilfully blind; and now that my eyes are opened, I shut them against the fault.  Away with your best-proved improbabilities, when the heart has been touched and the fancy fascinated.”

As a fitting pendent to this, I may further observe that the bringing of lions, serpents, palm-trees, rustic shepherds, and banished noblemen together in the Forest of Arden, is a strange piece of geographical license, which certain critics have not failed to make merry withal.  Perhaps they did not see that the very grossness of the thing proves it to have been designed.  The Poet keeps his geography true enough whenever he has cause to do so.  He knew, at all events, that lions did not roam at large in France.  By this irregular combination of actual things, he informs the whole with ideal effect, giving to this charming issue of his brain “a local habitation and a name,” that it may link-in with our flesh-and-blood sympathies, and at the same time turning it into a wild, wonderful, remote, fairy-land region, where all sorts of poetical things may take place without the slightest difficulty.  Of course Shakespeare would not have done thus, but that he saw quite through the grand critical humbug which makes the proper effect of a work of art depend upon our belief in the actual occurrence of the thing represented.  But your “critic grave and cool,” I suppose, is one who, like Wordsworth’s “model of a child,”

    “Can string you names of districts, cities, towns,
    The whole world over, tight as beads of dew
    Upon a gossamer thread:  he sifts, he weighs;
    All things are put to question; he must live
    Knowing that he grows wiser every day,
    Or else not live at all, and seeing too
    Each little drop of wisdom as it falls
    Into the dimpling cistern of his heart,
    O, give us once again the