Nor is it any drawback on her strength and substantial dignity of character, that her nature is all overflowing with romance:  rather, this it is that glorifies her, and breathes enchantment about her; it adds that precious seeing to the eye which conducts her to such winning beauty and sweetness of deportment, and makes her the “rich-souled creature” that Schlegel describes her to be.  Therewithal she may be aptly quoted as a mark-worthy instance how the Poet makes the several parts and persons of a drama cohere not only with one another but with the general circumstances wherein they occur.  For so in Portia’s character the splendour of Italian skies and scenery and art is reproduced; their spirit lives in her imagination, and is complicated with all she does and says.

* * * * *

If Portia is the beauty of this play, Shylock is its strength.  He is a standing marvel of power and scope in the dramatic art; at the same time appearing so much a man of Nature’s making, that we can hardly think of him as a creation of art.  In the delineation Shakespeare had no less a task than to fill with individual life and peculiarity the broad, strong outlines of national character in its most revolting form.  Accordingly Shylock is a true representative of his nation; wherein we have a pride which for ages never ceased to provoke hostility, but which no hostility could ever subdue; a thrift which still invited rapacity, but which no rapacity could ever exhaust; and a weakness which, while it exposed the subjects to wrong, only deepened their hate, because it kept them without the means or the hope of redress.  Thus Shylock is a type of national sufferings, national sympathies, national antipathies.  Himself an object of bitter insult and scorn to those about him; surrounded by enemies whom he is at once too proud to conciliate and too weak to oppose; he can have no life among them but money; no hold on them but interest; no feeling towards them but hate; no indemnity out of them but revenge.  Such being the case, what wonder that the elements of national greatness became congealed and petrified into malignity?  As avarice was the passion in which he mainly lived, the Christian virtues that thwarted this naturally seemed to him the greatest of wrongs.

With these strong national traits are interwoven personal traits equally strong.  Thoroughly and intensely Jewish, he is not more a Jew than he is Shylock.  In his hard, icy intellectuality, and his dry, mummy-like tenacity of purpose, with a dash now and then of biting sarcastic humour, we see the remains of a great and noble nature, out of which all the genial sap of humanity has been pressed by accumulated injuries.  With as much elasticity of mind as stiffness of neck, every step he takes but the last is as firm as the earth he treads upon.  Nothing can daunt, nothing disconcert him; remonstrance cannot move, ridicule cannot touch, obloquy cannot exasperate him:  when he has not provoked them, he has been forced to bear them; and now that he does provoke them, he is hardened against them.  In a word, he may be broken; he cannot be bent.