"They that went on crutches before he was born desire still their
life to see him a man.
Whereupon Archidamus sarcastically inquires:
"Would they else be content to die?"
and Camillo is forced to laughingly confess:
"Yes, if there were no other excuse why they should desire to live."
Still more absurd is the style in which the Third Gentleman describes, in the last scene of the play, the meeting between the king and his long-lost daughter and the aspect of the spectators. He says of Paulina:
She had one eye declined for the loss of her husband, another
elevated that the oracle was fulfilled.[2]
This comical diction reaches a climax in the following expressions:
"One of the prettiest touches of all, and that which angled for mine eyes, caught water though not the fish, was when at the relation of the queen's death, with the manner how she came to't, bravely confessed and lamented by the king, how attentiveness wounded his daughter; till, from one sign of dolour to another, she did, with an 'Alas,' I would fain say, bleed tears, for I am sure my heart wept blood. Who was most marble there changed colour; some swooned, all sorrowed: if all the world could have seen't the woe had been universal."
That Shakespeare's æsthetic sense did not sanction such expressions as these of the Third Gentleman scarcely needs stating. Perdita's language is that of nature itself. So great is her dislike of artificiality, that she will not even plant gardener's flowers in her garden, saying: