“What angel shall
    Bless this unworthy husband? he cannot thrive,
    Unless her prayers, which Heaven delights to hear,
    And loves to grant, reprieve him from the wrath
    Of greatest justice.”

To the King she is “all that is virtuous”; “young, wise, fair”; “virtue and she is her own dower.”  Lafeu remembers her at the close as “a sweet creature,” and as one

“Whose beauty did astonish the survey
Of richest eyes; whose words all ears took captive;
Whose dear perfection hearts that scorn’d to serve
Humbly call’d mistress.”

Thus she walks right into all hearts that have any doors for the entrance of virtue and loveliness.  And her modest, self-sacrificing worth is brought home to our feelings by the impression she makes on the good; while in turn our sense of their goodness is proportionably heightened by their noble sensibility to hers.

Parolles, again, is puffed up into a more consequential whiffet than ever, by being taken into the confidence of a haughty young nobleman; while, on the other side, the stultifying effects of Bertram’s pride are seen in that it renders him the easy dupe of a most base and bungling counterfeit of manhood.  It was natural and right, that such a shallow, paltry word-gun should ply him with impudent flatteries, and thereby gain an ascendency over him, and finally draw him into the crimes and the shames that were to whip down his pride; and it was equally natural that his scorn of Helena should begin to relax, when he was brought to see what a pitiful rascal, by playing upon that pride, had been making a fool of him.  He must first be mortified, before he can be purified.  The springs of moral health within him have been overspread by a foul disease; and the proper medicine is such an exposure of the latter as shall cause him to feel that he is himself a most fit object of the scorn which he has been so forward to bestow.  Accordingly the embossing and untrussing of his favourite is the starting of his amendment:  he begins to distrust the counsels of his cherished passion, when he can no longer hide from himself into what a vile misplacing of trust they have betrayed him.  Herein, also, we have a full justification, both moral and dramatic, of the game so mercilessly practised on Parolles:  it is avowedly undertaken with a view to rescue Bertram, whose friends know full well that nothing can be done for his good, till the fascination of that crawling reptile is broken.

Finally, Helena’s just discernment of character, as shown in the case of Parolles, pleads an arrest of judgment in behalf of Bertram.  And the fact that with all her love for him she is not blind to his faults, is a sort of pledge that she sees through them into a worth which they hide from others.  For, indeed, she has known him in his childhood, before his heart got pride-bound with conceit of rank and titles; and therefore may well have a reasonable faith, that beneath the follies and vices which have overcrusted his character, there is still an undercurrent of sense and virtue, a wisdom of nature, not dead but asleep, whereby he may yet be recovered.  So that, in effect, we are not unwilling to see him through her eyes, and, in the strength of her well-approved wisdom, to take it upon trust that he has good qualities which we are unable of ourselves to discover.