“So well to know
    Her own, that what she wills to do or say
    Seems wisest, virtuousest, discreetest, best.”

Portia’s consciousness of power does indeed render her cool, collected, and firm, but never a whit unfeminine:  her smooth command both of herself and of the matter she goes about rather heightens our sense of her modesty than otherwise:  so that the impression we take from her is, that these high mental prerogatives are of no sex; that they properly belong to the common freehold of woman and man; and that the ladies of creation have just as good a right to them as the lords.  Some of her speeches, especially at the trial, are evidently premeditated; for, as any good lawyer would do, she of course prepares herself in the case beforehand; but I should like to see the masculine lawyer that could premeditate any thing equal to them.  It is to be noted withal that she goes about her work without the least misgiving as to the result; having so thoroughly booked herself both in the facts and the law of the case as to feel perfectly sure on that point.  Hence the charming ease and serenity with which she moves amid the excitements of the trial.  No trepidations of anxiety come in to disturb the preconcerted order and method of her course.  And her solemn appeals to the Jew are made in the earnest hope of inducing him to accept a full and liberal discharge of the debt.  When she says to him, “there’s thrice thy money offer’d thee,” it is because she really feels that both the justice of the cause and the honour of her husband would be better served by such a payment than by the more brilliant triumph which awaits her in case the Jew should spurn her offer.

Thus her management of the trial, throughout, is a piece of consummate art; though of art in such a sense as presupposes perfect integrity of soul.  Hence, notwithstanding her methodical forecast and preparation, she is as eloquent as an angel, and her eloquence, as by an instinctive tact, knows its time perfectly.  One of her strains in this kind, her appeal to the Jew on the score of mercy, has been so often quoted, that it would long since have grown stale, if it were possible by any means to crush the freshness of unwithering youth out of it.  And I hope it will not be taken as any abatement of the speaker’s claim as a wise jurist, that she there carries both the head and the heart of a ripe Christian divine into the management of her cause.  Yet her style in that speech is in perfect keeping with her habitual modes of thought and discourse:  even in her most spontaneous expressions we have a reflex of the same intellectual physiognomy.  For the mental aptitude which she displays in the trial seems to have been the germinal idea out of which her whole part was consistently evolved; as the Poet’s method often was, apparently, first to settle what his persons were to do, and then to conceive and work out their characters accordingly.