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The best she hath; and she, of all compounded,

Outsells them all.

That the moral and intellectual beauty of his heroine are conceived by the dramatist to be as ideally exalted as her personal graces, we must proceed to shew, by fully examining those relations between her and the principal hero, Leonatus Posthumus, which form the nucleus of the story. It is the more indispensable to do this, because a critic of so much authority as Hazlitt has told his readers, in speaking of Imogen, that "Posthumus is only interesting from the interest she takes in him; and she is only interesting herself from her tenderness and constancy to her husband;"-which is equivalent to saying, that Imogen is interesting to us only because she is herself interested for a man who does not deserve it. How grievous an abasement is here made of the real conception which the dramatist exhibits of both characters-more especially that of the heroine, a little close attention to the developement of the drama itself will discover most convincingly. In order to judge aright respecting the dignity of Imogen's love to see whether, in directing her choice, her intellect had not an equal share with her heart-we must, of necessity, first of all consider the personal qualities wherewith the poet has distinctly and emphatically endowed his hero.

We first hear of him, from the introductory information given by one of the courtiers to some enquiring visitor, as "a poor but worthy gentleman." The same speaker terms him

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As, to seek through the regions of the earth

For one his like, there would be something failing
In him that should compare. I do not think,

So fair an outward, and such stuff within,

Endows a man but he.

We are not, however, left to judge of him from these general though decided commendations: the same impartial narrator thus gives us his history and character in full::

His father

Was call'd Sicilius, who did join his banner,
Against the Romans, with Cassibelan;
But had his titles by Tenantius, whom
He serv'd with glory and admir'd success;
So gain'd the sur-addition Leonatus :

And had, besides this gentleman in question,
Two other sons, who in the wars o' the time,

Died with their swords in hand; for which their father
(Then old and fond of issue) took such sorrow,
That he quit being; and his gentle lady,
Big of this gentleman, our theme, deceas'd
As he was born. The king, he takes the babe
To his protection; calls him Posthumus;
Breeds him, and makes him of his bedchamber;
Puts to him all the learnings that his time
Could make him the receiver of; which he took
As we do air, fast as 'twas minister'd; and
In his spring became a harvest: liv'd in court
(Which rare it is to do) most prais'd, most lov'd;
A sample to the youngest; to the more mature,
A glass that feated them; and to the graver,
A child that guided dotards: to his mistress,
For whom he now is banish'd,—her own price
Proclaims how she esteem'd him and his virtue ;
By her election may be truly read
What kind of man he is.

The poet, we see, takes good care to let us know, at the very outset, that his heroine has made the wisest as well as the most generous and most amorous choice of a husband-that, without forgetting the princess, she has chosen as a noble and cultivated womanmaking personal merit in her lover the first consideration; and that she has not been mistaken, for that all the world confirm her judgment. We may, then, take Imogen's own word for it, when afterwards, in describing her husband's person, she talks of

His foot Mercurial, and his Martial thigh;
The brawns of Hercules; and his Jovial face,—

epithets which inevitably remind us of those words of Hamlet

A combination and a form, indeed,

Where every god did seem to set his seal,
To give the world assurance of a man.

And we see that she is thoroughly justified in saying to her father,

Sir,

It is your fault that I have lov'd Posthumus:
You bred him as my play-fellow; and he is
A man worth any woman.

The opening conversation had already informed the
auditor that everybody, except her stepmother and
the foolish prince her suitor, regarded Imogen as
being in the right, and her father in the wrong—
He that hath miss'd the princess, is a thing

Too bad for bad report.

Imogen herself, then, may well speak as she does in the following dialogue:

Cym. That might'st have had the sole son of my queen!
Imo. O bless'd, that I might not! I chose an eagle,

And did avoid a puttock.

Cym. Thou took'st a beggar; would'st have made

A seat for baseness.

Imo.

A lustre to it!

No I rather added

my throne

Indeed, she has not only all the good feeling, but all the right reasoning, on her side.

The brief experience which the dramatist gives us of the words and behaviour of Posthumus before his departure into exile, maintains this character; yet, even in these opening scenes, we find indications of that superior harmony of qualities in Imogen over her husband-that steady intellect, ever beaming serenely (as has been somewhere said of Heloise) over even the darkest and most troublous agitations of passion and affection in her breast-which we find developed in the course of her following eventful story.

The conduct of Posthumus in his exile has commonly been taxed with gross impropriety in making the wager with Iachimo respecting the virtue of his wife, and with rash credulity in accepting the Italian's own account of the success of his experiment. These combined imputations tend so seriously to lower the dignity of Posthumus's character, and, by implication, to impugn the judgment of Imogen as

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regards her exalted estimation of him, that in justice to the dramatist, who has not escaped censure in the matter, we must at once proceed to examine how far the charges against him on this account are really grounded.

In Shakespeare's time, Italian craft was no less proverbial in England than Italian voluptuousness. The character of Iachimo is a sort of compound of the Roman epicureanism of the Augustan age, in which the story is laid, with the Machiavellianism in domestic as well as public life which prevailed in Italy in the dramatist's own day. Now, the character of the noble British exile is made by Shakespeare to present, in both these points, a perfect contrast, being distinguished by purity of manners and open directness of conduct. Iachimo himself, in his confessing scene, places this contrast emphatically before us;—

A nobler sir ne'er liv'd

"Twixt sky and ground.

The good Posthumus

(What should I say?-he was too good to be
Where ill men were; and was the best of all
Amongst the rar'st of good ones)-sitting sadly,
Hearing us praise our loves of Italy

For beauty that made barren the swell'd boast
Of him that best could speak;-for feature, laming
The shrine of Venus, or straight-pight Minerva,
Postures beyond brief nature; for condition,
A shop of all the qualities that man

Loves woman for; besides that hook of wiving,
Fairness which strikes the eye:

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And, not dispraising whom we prais'd (therein

He was as calm as virtue), he began

His mistress' picture, which by his tongue being made,

And then a mind put in't, either our brags

Were crack'd of kitchen trulls, or his description

Prov'd us unspeaking sots.

Your daughter's chastity- there it begins!-
He spake of her as Dian had hot dreams,
And she alone were cold: whereat I, wretch !
Made scruple of his praise, and wager'd with him
Pieces of gold, 'gainst this which then he wore

Upon his honour'd finger, to attain

In suit the place of his bed, and win this ring
By hers and mine adultery.

To estimate the shock which the mind and feelings of this "noble lord in love, and one that had a royal lover," must have received from his first encounter with the bold-faced Italian libertine, let us revert for a moment to those exquisite parting scenes whose impression was freshest of all in his heart. Their finest, sweetest spirit is breathed in those concluding lines of Imogen, which it is no more possible to grow weary of citing or of reading, than it is to tire of hearing the repeated notes of the nightingale :

I did not take my leave of him, but had
Most pretty things to say. Ere I could tell him
How I would think on him at certain hours,

Such thoughts and such; or I could make him swear
The shes of Italy should not betray

Mine interest, and his honour; or have charg'd him,
At the sixth hour of morn, at noon, at midnight,
To encounter me with orisons, for then

I am in heaven for him; or ere I could

Give him that parting kiss which I had set

Betwixt two charming words ;-comes in my father,
And, like the tyrannous breathing of the north,
Shakes all our buds from growing!

Shall it be said, we may ask by the way, that a heroine who can so think, and feel, and speak, is interesting only from her affectionate constancy to her husband-that she has no intellectual charms inherent and independent of any affection whatsoever, notwithstanding that affection stimulates their most beautiful developement? On the other hand, how must the man who had enjoyed the glorious fortune to be brought up with such a being as his

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playfellow," and now to have her as his newly wedded wife,-whose sole intercourse with the sex had been at once so virtuous and so delicious,—have been startled and irritated by the notions and sentiments which he heard put forth by the unscrupulous though elegantly cultivated man of the world, whose experience of the sex, though otherwise miscellaneous,

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