“Oft startled and made wise
    By their low-breathed interpretings,
    The simply-meek foretaste the springs
          Of bitter contraries.”

But the sorrow can hardly be ungrateful to us, that has such noble comforters as Antonio’s.  Our nature is honoured in the feelings that spring up on both sides.

Wealth indeed seldom dispenses such warnings save to its most virtuous possessors.  And such is Antonio.  A kind-hearted and sweet-mannered man; of a large and liberal spirit; affable, generous, and magnificent in his dispositions; patient of trial, indulgent to weakness, free where he loves, and frank where he hates; in prosperity modest, in adversity cheerful; craving wealth for the uses of virtue, and as the sinews of friendship;—­his character is one which we never weary of contemplating.  The only blemish we perceive in him is his treatment of Shylock:  in this, though evidently much more the fault of the times than of the man, we cannot help siding against him; than which we need not ask a clearer instance of poetical justice.  Yet even this we blame rather as a wrong done to himself than to Shylock; inasmuch as the latter, notwithstanding he has had such provocations, avowedly grounds his hate mainly on those very things which make the strongest title to a good man’s love.  For the Jew’s revenge fastens not so much on the man’s abuse of him as on his kindness to others.

* * * * *

The friendship between the Merchant and his companions is such a picture as Shakespeare evidently delighted to draw.  And so fair a sentiment is not apt to inhabit ignoble breasts.  Bassanio, Gratiano, and Salarino are each admirable in their way, and give a pleasing variety to the scenes where they move.  Bassanio, though something too lavish of purse, is a model of a gentleman; in whose character and behaviour all is order and propriety; with whom good manners are the proper outside and visibility of a fair mind,—­the natural foliage and drapery of inward refinement and delicacy and rectitude.  Well-bred, he has that in him which, even had his breeding been ill, would have raised him above it and made him a gentleman.

Gratiano and Salarino are two as clever, sprightly, and voluble persons as any one need desire to be with; the chief difference between them being, that the former lets his tongue run on from good impulses, while the latter makes it do so for good ends.  If not so wise as Bassanio, they are more witty; and as much surpass him in strength, as they fall short of him in beauty, of character.  It is observable that of the two Gratiano, while much the more prone to flood us with his talk, also shows less subjection of the individual to the common forms of social decorum; so that, if he behaves not quite so well as the others, he gives livelier proof that what good behaviour he has is his own; a growth from within, not a piece of imitation.  And we are rather agreeably surprised,