on the principle of noblesse oblige, he tries to become worthy of her.  This love makes the cowardly brave, the weak strong, the dull witty, the prosy poetic, the slouches tidy.  Burton glows eloquent on this subject (Ill., 2), confounding, as usual, love with lust.  Ovid notes that when Polyphemus courted Galatea the desire to please made him arrange his hair and beard, using the water as a mirror; wherein the Roman poet shows a keener sense of the effect of infatuation than his Greek predecessor, Theocritus, who (Id., XIV.) describes the enamoured Aischines as going about with beard neglected and hair dishevelled; or than Callimachus, concerning whose love-story of Acontius and Cydippe Mahaffy says (G.  L. and T., 239): 

“The pangs of the lover are described just as they are described in the case of his [Shakspere’s] Orlando—­dishevelled hair, blackness under the eyes, disordered dress, a desire for solitude, and the habit of writing the girl’s name on every tree—­symptoms which are perhaps now regarded as natural, and which many romantic personages have no doubt imitated because they found them in literature, and thought them the spontaneous expression of the grief of love, while they were really the artificial invention of Callimachus and his school, who thus fathered them upon human nature.”

Professor Mahaffy overlooks, however, an important distinction which Shakspere makes.  The witty Rosalind declares to Orlando, in her bantering way, that

“there is a man haunts the forest, that abuses our young plants with carving ‘Rosalind’ on their barks; hangs odes upon hawthorns and elegies on brambles, all, forsooth, deifying the name of Rosalind ... he seems to have the quotidian of love upon him.”

And when Orlando claims that he is that man, she replies, “There is none of my uncle’s marks upon you; he taught me to know a man in love.”

Orlando:  “What were his marks?”

Rosalind: 

“A lean cheek, which you have not, a blue eye and sunken, which you have not ... a beard neglected, which you have not ...  Then your hose should be ungartered, your bonnet unbanded, your sleeve unbuttoned, your shoe untied, and everything about you demonstrating a careless desolation.”

Shakspere knew that love makes a man tidy, not untidy, hence Rosalind fails to find the artificial Greek symptoms of love in Orlando, while she admits that he carves her name on trees and hangs poems on them; acts of which lovers are quite capable.  In Japan it is a national custom to hang love-poems on trees.

VIII.  SYMPATHY

“Egotism,” wrote Schopenhauer