Equally remarkable is the Poet’s intellectual plenipotence in so ordering and moving the several characters of a play as that they may best draw out each other by mutual influences, and set off each other by mutual contrasts.  The persons are thus assorted and attempered with perfect insight both of their respective natures and of their common fitness to his purpose.  And not the least wonderful thing in his works is the exquisite congruity of what comes from the persons with all the circumstances and influences under which they are represented as acting; their transpirations of character being withal so disposed that the principle of them shines out freely and clearly on the mind.  We have a good instance of this in Romeo’s speech just before he swallows the poison; every word of which is perfectly idiomatic of the speaker, and at the same time thoroughly steeped in the idiom of his present surroundings.  It is true, Shakespeare’s persons, like those in real life, act so, chiefly because they are so; but so perfectly does he seize and impart the germ of a character, along with the proper conditions of its development, that the results seem to follow all of their own accord.  Thus in his delineations every thing is fitted to every other thing; so that each requires and infers the others, and all hang together in most natural coherence and congruity.

To illustrate this point a little more in detail, let us take his treatment of passion.  How many forms, degrees, varieties of passion he has portrayed!  Yet I am not aware that any instance of disproportion or unfitness has ever been successfully pointed out in his works.  With but two or three exceptions at the most, so perfect is the correspondence between the passion and the character, and so freely and fitly does the former grow out of the circumstances in which the latter is placed, that we have no difficulty in justifying and accounting for the passion.  The passion is thoroughly characteristic, and pervaded with the individuality of its subject.  And this holds true not only of different passions, but of different modifications of the same passion; the forms of love, for instance, being just as various and distinct as the characters in which it is shown.  Then too he unfolds a passion in its rise and progress, its turns and vicissitudes, its ebbings and flowings, so that we go along with it freely and naturally from first to last.  Even when, as in case of Ferdinand and Miranda, or of Romeo and Juliet, he ushers in a passion at its full height, he so contrives to throw the mind back or around upon various predisposing causes and circumstances, as to carry our sympathies through without any revulsion.  We are so prepared for the thing by the time it comes as to feel no abruptness in its coming.  The exceptions to this, save in some of the Poet’s earlier plays, are very rare indeed:  the only one I have ever seemed to find is the jealousy of Leontes in The Winter’s Tale, and I am by no means sure of it even there.