dy, this truth is emphasised by the
triumph of Costard, a natural mind, in an encounter with Armado, an
artificial mind. At the end of the play the "learned men" are made to
compile a dialogue "in praise of the owl and the cuckoo." The dialogue
is of a kind not usual among learned men, but the choice of the birds is
significant. The last speech of the play: "The words of Mercury are
harsh after the songs of Apollo," seems to refer to Marlowe, as though
Shakespeare found it hard to justify an art so unlike his master's.
Marlowe climbs the peaks in the sun, his bow never off his shoulders. I
walk the roads of the earth among men.

There is little character drawing in the piece. The Princess is a
gracious figure; but hardly real to us till the last scene of the play,
when she speaks wisely. Biron is more of a person. He presents his point
of view in a moment of pleasant poetry--

"For where is any author in the world,
Teaches such beauty as a woman's eye?"

He shows a prejudice against Boyet, the courtier in attendance on the
Princess. This prejudice is expressed bitterly--

"This is the flower that smiles on every one,"

with the bitterness usual in Shakespeare when treating of the flunkey
mind. The ladies of the Princess's train all talk exactly alike, with
sharp feminine wit, infinitely swift in thrust. None of them has
personality; but Rosaline is described for us, body and disposition. The
members of the sub-plot are mental fashions well observed. Costard alone
has life. Shakespeare came from the country. In the country a thinking
man is reminded daily of the shrewdness of unspoiled minds. Armado,
Costard's opponent, lives for us by one phrase--

"The sweet war-man is dead and rotten: sweet chucks, beat not the
bones of the buried: when he breathed, he was a man."

It is interesting to see Shakespeare's mind trying for vividness. In his
maturity he had supremely the power of giving life. In this early play
one can see his first conscious literary efforts towards the obtaining
of the power. Longaville (in Act II, sc. i) makes the scene alive by the
question--

"I beseech you a word. What is she in the white?"

(Who is the woman in the white dress?) The simple but telling means of
giving reality is repeated a few lines later in Biron's question--

"What's her name in the cap?"

In Act V, sc. ii, the vividness is given in a strangely pathetic
passage, that haunts, after the pla