This is
your forest of Arden; and you are either the banished Duke in person,
or one of the chief nobles in his train. The melancholy Jacques,
perhaps? Be it so. In that case, you can probably do me a favor."
I never, in my life, felt less inclined to confer a favor on any man.
"I am busy," said I.
So unexpectedly had the stranger made me sensible of his presence,
that he had almost the effect of an apparition; and certainly a less
appropriate one (taking into view the dim woodland solitude about us)
than if the salvage man of antiquity, hirsute and cinctured with a
leafy girdle, had started out of a thicket. He was still young,
seemingly a little under thirty, of a tall and well-developed figure,
and as handsome a man as ever I beheld. The style of his beauty,
however, though a masculine style, did not at all commend itself to
my taste. His countenance--I hardly know how to describe the
peculiarity--had an indecorum in it, a kind of rudeness, a hard,
coarse, forth-putting freedom of expression, which no degree of
external polish could have abated one single jot. Not that it was
vulgar. But he had no fineness of nature; there was in his eyes
(although they might have artifice enough of another sort) the naked
exposure of something that ought not to be left prominent. With
these vague allusions to what I have seen in other faces as well as
his, I leave the quality to be comprehended best--because with an
intuitive repugnance--by those who possess least of it.
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