the ducats and took the bond, on a mere chance of coming at his wish.  But he would hardly grasp so eagerly at a bare possibility of revenge, without using means to turn it into something more.  This would mark him with much deeper lines of guilt.  Why, then, did not Shakespeare bring the matter forward more prominently?  Perhaps it was because the doing so would have made Shylock appear too steep a criminal for the degree of interest which his part was meant to carry in the play.  In other words, the health of the drama as a work of comic art required his criminality to be kept in the background.  He comes very near overshadowing the other characters too much, as it is.  And Shylock’s character is essentially tragic; there is none of the proper timber of comedy in him.

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The Merchant of Venice is justly distinguished among Shakespeare’s dramas, not only for the general felicity of the language, but also for the beauty of particular scenes and passages.  For descriptive power, the opening scene of Antonio and his friends is not easily rivalled, and can hardly fail to live in the memory of any one having an eye for such things.  Equally fine in its way is the scene of Tubal and Shylock, where the latter is so torn with the struggle of conflicting passions; his heart now sinking with grief at the account of his fugitive daughter’s expenses, now leaping with malignant joy at the report of Antonio’s losses.  The trial-scene, with its tugging vicissitudes of passion, and its hush of terrible expectation,—­now ringing with the Jew’s sharp, spiteful snaps of malice, now made musical with Portia’s strains of eloquence, now holy with Antonio’s tender breathings of friendship, and dashed, from time to time, with Gratiano’s fierce jets of wrath, and fiercer jets of mirth,—­is hardly surpassed in tragic power anywhere; and as it forms the catastrophe proper, so it concentrates the interest of the whole play.  Scarcely inferior in its kind is the night-scene of Lorenzo and Jessica, bathed as it is in love, moonlight, “touches of sweet harmony,” and soul-lifting discourse, followed by the grave moral reflections of Portia, as she approaches her home, and sees its lights, and hears its music.  The bringing in of this passage of ravishing lyrical sweetness, so replete with the most soothing and tranquillizing effect, close upon the intense dramatic excitement of the trial-scene, is such a transition as we shall hardly meet with but in Shakespeare, and aptly shows his unequalled mastery of the mind’s capacities of delight.  The affair of the rings, with the harmless perplexities growing out of it, is a well-managed device for letting the mind down from the tragic height whereon it lately stood, to the merry conclusion which the play requires.  Critics, indeed, may easily quarrel with this sportive after-piece; but it stands approved by the tribunal to which Criticism itself must bow,—­the spontaneous feelings of such as are willing to be made cheerful and healthy, without beating their brains about the how and wherefore.  It is in vain that critics tell us we ought to “laugh by precept only, and shed tears by rule.”