I swear to thee, youth, by the white hand of Rosalind,
I
am that he, that unfortunate he.
ROSALIND. But are you so much in love as your rhymes speak?
ORLANDO. Neither rhyme nor reason can express how much.
ROSALIND. Love is merely a madness; and, I tell you, deserves
as
well a dark house and a whip as madmen do; and the reason why
they are not so punish'd and cured is that the lunacy is so
ordinary that the whippers are in love too. Yet I profess
curing
it by counsel.
ORLANDO. Did you ever cure any so?
ROSALIND. Yes, one; and in this manner. He was to imagine me
his
love, his mistress; and I set him every day to woo me; at
which
time would I, being but a moonish youth, grieve, be
effeminate,
changeable, longing and liking, proud, fantastical, apish,
shallow, inconstant, full of tears, full of smiles; for every
passion something and for no passion truly anything, as boys
and
women are for the most part cattle of this colour; would now
like
him, now loathe him; then entertain him, then forswear him;
now
weep for him, then spit at him; that I drave my suitor from
his
mad humour of love to a living humour of madness; which was,
to
forswear the full stream of the world and to live in a nook
merely monastic.
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