It were all one
     That I should love a bright particular star,
     And think to wed it; he is so above me: 
     In his bright radiance and collateral light
     Must I be comforted, not in his sphere. 
     Th’ ambition in my love thus plagues itself;
     The hind that would be mated by the lion,
     Must die for love.  ‘Twas pretty, tho’ a plague,
     To see him every hour, to sit and draw
     His arched brows, his hawking eye, his curls
     In our heart’s table:  heart too capable
     Of every line and trick of his sweet favour. 
     But now he’s gone, and my idolatrous fancy
     Must sanctify his relics.

The interest excited by this beautiful picture of a kind and innocent heart is kept up afterwards by her resolution to follow him to France, the success of her experiment in restoring the king’s health, her demanding Bertram in marriage as a recompense, his leaving her in disdain, her interview with him afterwards disguised as Diana, a young lady whom he importunes with his secret addresses, and their final reconciliation when the consequences of her stratagem and the proofs of her love are fully made known.  The persevering gratitude of the French king to his benefactress, who cures him of a languishing distemper by a prescription hereditary in her family, the indulgent kindness of the Countess, whose pride of birth yields, almost without struggle, to her affection for Helen, the honesty and uprightness of the good old lord Lafeu, make very interesting parts of the picture.  The wilful stubbornness and youthful petulance of Bertram are also very admirably described.  The comic part of the play turns on the folly, boasting, and cowardice of Parolles, a parasite and hanger-on of Bertram’s, the detection of whose false pretensions to bravery and honour forms a very amusing episode.  He is first found out by the old lord Lafeu, who says, ’The soul of this man is in his clothes’; and it is proved afterwards that his heart is in his tongue, and that both are false and hollow.  The adventure of’the bringing off of his drum’ has become proverbial as a satire on all ridiculous and blustering undertakings which the person never means to perform:  nor can anything be more severe than what one of the bystanders remarks upon what Parolles says of himself, ’Is it possible he should know what he is, and be that he is?’ Yet Parolles himself gives the best solution of the difficulty afterwards when he is thankful to escape with his life and the loss of character; for, so that he can live on, he is by no means squeamish about the loss of pretensions, to which he had sense enough to know he had no real claims, and which he had assumed only as a means to live.

   Parolles.  Yet I am thankful; if my heart were great,
     ’Twould burst at this.  Captain I’ll be no more,
     But I will eat and drink, and sleep as soft
     As captain shall.  Simply the thing I am