for there is nothing so logical as passion. They know their own minds exactly; and only follow up a favourite idea, which they have sworn to with their tongues, and which is engraven on their hearts, into its untoward consequences. They are

the prettiest little set of martyrs and confessors on record.-Cibber, in speaking of the early English stage, accounts for the want of prominence and theatrical display in Shakspeare's female characters from the circumstance, that women in those days were not allowed to play the parts of women, which made it necessary to keep these a good deal in the background. Does not this state of manners itself, which prevented their exhibiting themselves in public, and confined them to the relations and charities of domestic life, afford a truer explanation of the matter? His women are certainly very unlike stage-heroines; the reverse of tragedyqueens.

We have almost as great an affection for Imogen as she had for Posthumus; and she deserves it better. Of all Shakspeare's women she is perhaps the most tender and the most artless. Her incredulity in the opening scene with Iachimo, as to her husband's infidelity, is much the same as Desdemona's backwardness to believe Othello's jealousy. Her answer to the most distressing part

of the picture is only, "My lord, I fear, has forgot Britain." Her readiness to pardon Iachimo's false imputations and his designs against herself, is a good lesson to prudes; and may show that where there is a real attachment to virtue, it has no need to bolster itself up with an outrageous or affected antipathy to vice. The scene in which Pisanio gives Imogen his master's letter, accusing her of incontinency on the treacherous suggestions of Iachimo, is as touching as it is possible for anything to be :

"Pisanio. What cheer, Madam?

Imogen. False to his bed! What is it to be false ?·

To lie in watch there, and to think on him?

To weep 'twixt clock and clock? If sleep charge nature,
To break it with a fearful dream of him,

And cry myself awake? That's false to his bed,
Is it?

Pisanio. Alas, good lady!

Imogen. I false? thy conscience witness :-Iachimo,
Thou didst accuse him of incontinency;

Thou then look'dst like a villain; now, methinks,
Thy favour's good enough. Some jay of Italy,

Whose mother was her painting, hath betrayed him :

Poor I am stale, a garment out of fashion,

And, for I am richer than to hang by the walls,

I must be ripp'd:-to pieces with me !—O,

Men's vows are women's traitors! All good seeming,
By thy revolt, O husband, shall be thought
Put on for villany: not born, where 't grows,
But worn a bait for ladies.

Imogen. Talk thy tongue weary; speak:

I have heard I am a strumpet; and mine ear,

Therein false struck, can take no greater wound,

Nor tent to bottom that."

When Pisanio, who had been charged to kill his mistress, puts her in a way to live, she says,

What shall I do the while? Where bide? How

Or in my life what comfort, when I am

Dead to my husband?"

Yet when he advises her to disguise herself in boy's clothes, and suggests "a course pretty, and full of view :" by which she may, "haply, be near the residence of Posthumus," she exclaims,

"O, for such means!

Though peril to my modesty, not death on 't,

I would adventure."

And when Pisanio, enlarging on the consequences,

tells her she must change

"Fear and niceness

(The handmaids of all women, or, more truly,
Woman its pretty self) into a waggish courage;
Ready in gibes, quick answer'd, saucy, and
As quarrellous as the weasel;"

she interrupts him hastily;

"Nay, be brief;

I see into thy end, and am almost

A man already."

In her journey thus disguised to Milford-Haven, she loses her guide and her way; and unbosoming her complaints, says beautifully,

"My dear lord!

Thou art one o' the false ones: now I think on thee,
My hunger's gone; but even before, I was

At point to sink for food."

She afterwards finds, as she thinks, the dead body of Posthumus, and engages herself as a footboy to serve a Roman officer, when she has done all due obsequies to him whom she calls her former master

"And when

With wild wood-leaves and weeds I have strew'd his grave,
And on it said a century of prayers,

Such as I can, twice o'er, I'll weep and sigh;
And, leaving so his service, follow you,

So please you entertain me."

Now this is the very religion of love. She all along relies little on her personal charms, which she fears may have been eclipsed by some painted jay of Italy; she relies on her merit, and her merit is in the depth of her love, her truth and constancy. Our admiration of her beauty is excited with as little consciousness as possible on her part. There are two delicious descriptions given of her, one when she is asleep, and one when she is supposed dead. Arviragus thus addresses her

"With fairest flowers,

Whilst summer lasts, and I live here, Fidele,
I'll sweeten thy sad grave; thou shalt not lack
The flower that's like thy face, pale primrose; nor
The azur'd hare-bell, like thy veins; no, nor
The leaf of eglantine, whom not to slander,
Out-sweeten'd not thy breath."

The yellow Iachimo gives another thus, when he

steals into her bed-chamber :-
:-

"Cytherea,

How bravely thou becom'st thy bed! fresh lily,
And whiter than the sheets! That I might touch!
But kiss, one kiss! Rubies unparagon'd,

How dearly they do 't.-'Tis her breathing that
Perfumes the chamber thus: the flame o' the taper
Bows toward her; and would under-peep her lids,
To see the enclosed lights, now canopied
Under these windows; white and azure, laced
With blue of Heav'n's own tint.-On her left breast
A mole cinque-spotted, like the crimson drops
I' the bottom of a cowslip."

There is a moral sense in the proud beauty of this last image, a rich surfeit of the fancy,-as that well-known passage beginning, "Me of my lawful pleasure she restrained, and prayed me oft forbearance," sets a keener edge upon it by the inimitable picture of modesty and self-denial.

The character of Cloten, the conceited, booby lord, and rejected lover of Imogen, though not very agreeable in itself, and at present obsolete, is drawn with great humour and knowledge of character. The description which Imogen gives of his unwelcome addresses to her-"Whose love-suit hath been to me as fearful as a siege "-is enough to cure the most ridiculous lover of his folly. It is remarkable that though Cloten makes so poor a figure in love, he is described as assuming an air