The Poet’s idealizing of his characters proceeds, in part, by putting his own intellectuality into them.  And the wonder is, how he could do this in so large a measure as he often does, without marring or displacing or anywise obstructing their proper individuality.  For they are never any the less themselves for having so much of his intelligence in them.  Nay, more; whatever may be their peculiarity, whether wit, dulness, egotism, or absurdity, the effect of that infusion is to quicken their idiom, and set it free, so that they become all the more rightly and truly themselves.  Thus what he gives them operates to extricate and enfranchise their propriety, and bring it out in greater clearness and purity.  His intellectuality discovers them to us just as they are, and translates their mind, or want of mind, into fitting language, yet remains so transparently clear as to be itself unseen.  He tells more truth of them, or rather makes them tell more truth of themselves, in a single sentence, than, without his help, they could tell in a month.  The secret of this appears to lie in sifting out what is most idiomatic or characteristic of a man, purging and depurating this of all that is uncharacteristic, and then presenting the former unmixed and free, the man of the man.

We have a very striking instance of this in King Henry the Fifth, where the Boy, who figures as servant to Bardolph, Pistol, and Nym, soliloquizes his judgment of those worthies:  “As young as I am, I have observed these three swashers.  I am boy to them all three; but they all three, though they would serve me, could not be man to me; for indeed three such antics do not amount to a man.  For Bardolph,—­he is white-liver’d and red-fac’d; by the means whereof ’a faces it out, but fights not.  For Pistol,—­he hath a killing tongue and a quiet sword; by the means whereof ’a breaks words, and keeps whole weapons.  For Nym,—­he hath heard that men of few words are the best men; and therefore he scorns to say his prayers, lest ’a should be thought a coward:  but his few bad words are match’d with as few good deeds; for ’a never broke any man’s head but his own, and that was against a post when he was drunk.  They will steal any thing, and call it purchase.  Bardolph stole a lute-case, bore it twelve leagues, and sold it for three half-pence.  Nym and Bardolph are sworn brothers in filching; and in Calais they stole a fire-shovel:  I knew by that piece of service the men would carry coals.  They would have me as familiar with men’s pockets as their gloves or their handkerchers:  which makes much against my manhood, if I should take from another’s pocket to put into mine; for it is plain pocketing-up of wrongs.  I must leave them, and seek some better service:  their villainy goes against my weak stomach, and therefore I must cast it up.”