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.
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