There is hardly any of Shakespeare’s plays that contains a greater number of passages that have been quoted in books of extracts, or a greater number of phrases that have become in a manner proverbial.  If we were to give all the striking passages, we should give half the play.  We will only recall a few of the most delightful to the reader’s recollection.  Such are the meeting between Orlando and Adam, the exquisite appeal of Orlando to the humanity of the Duke and his company to supply him with food for the old man, and their answer, the Duke’s description of a country life, and the account of Jaques moralizing on the wounded deer, his meeting with Touchstone in the forest, his apology for his own melancholy and his satirical vein, and the well-known speech on the stages of human life, the old song of ‘Blow, blow, thou winter’s wind’, Rosalind’s description of the marks of a lover and of the progress of time with different persons, the picture of the snake wreathed round Oliver’s neck while the lioness watches her sleeping prey, and Touchstone’s lecture to the shepherd, his defence of cuckolds, and panegyric on the virtues of ’an If.—­All of these are familiar to the reader:  there is one passage of equal delicacy and beauty which may have escaped him, and with it we shall close our account of As You Like it.  It is Phebe’s description of Ganimed at the end of the third act.

     Think not I love him, tho’ I ask for him;
     Tis but a peevish boy, yet he talks well;—­
     But what care I for words! yet words do well,
     When he that speaks them pleases those that hear;
     It is a pretty youth; not very pretty;
     But sure he’s proud, and yet his pride becomes him;
     He’ll make a proper man; the best thing in him
     Is his complexion; and faster than his tongue
     Did make offence, his eye did heal it up: 
     He is not very tall, yet for his years he’s tall;
     His leg is but so so, and yet’tis well;
     There was a pretty redness in his lip,
     A little riper, and more lusty red
     Than that mix’d in his cheek; ’twas just the difference
     Betwixt the constant red and mingled damask. 
     There be some women, Silvius, had they mark’d him
     In parcels as I did, would have gone near
     To fall in love with him:  but for my part
     I love him not, nor hate him not; and yet
     I have more cause to hate him than to love him;
     For what had he to do to chide at me?

THE TAMING OF THE SHREW