“When I consider
    What great creation and what dole of honour
    Flies where you bid it, I find that she, which late
    Was in my nobler thoughts most base, is now
    The praised of the King.”

Marriage, in truth, is a thing that he has not begun to think of; the passion that rightly leads to it is yet dormant in him; to the proper charms of woman he is insensible, his heart being all set on other things.  Then, again, he does not leave Helena as a profligate, but rather to escape from what is to him an unholy match, as being on his side without love; and his profligacy is not so much the cause as the consequence of his flight and exile.  In the midst of his manlier work, he is surprised into a passion unfelt by him before; and the tie which has been strained upon him, and which his heart still disowns, is partly to blame for the profligate intrigue into which he plunges, because it shuts off the conditions of an honourable love.—­Finally, he is not dismissed to happiness, but rather left where he cannot be happy, unless he shall have dismissed his faults.  And, surely, he may have some allowance, because of the tyranny laid upon him,—­this too in a sentiment where nature pleads loudest for freedom, and which, if free, yields the strongest motives to virtue; if not, to vice.

As for his falsehood, or rather string of falsehoods, this is indeed a pretty dark passage.  The guilty passion with which he is caught betrays him into a course of action still more guilty:  he is entangled, almost before he knows it, in a net of vile intrigue, from which there is no escape but by lying his way out; and the more he struggles to get free the more he gets engaged.  It seems an earnest of “the staggers and the cureless lapse of youth” with which the King has threatened him.  But he pays a round penalty in the shame that so quickly overtakes him; which shows how careful the Poet was to make due provision for his amendment.  His original fault, as already noted, was an overweening pride of birth:  yet in due time he unfolds in himself better titles to honour than ancestry can bestow; and, this done, he naturally grows more willing to recognize similar titles in another.  It is to be noted further, that Bertram is all along a man of few words; which may be one reason why Parolles, who is all words, as his name imports, burrs upon him and works his infection into him with such signal success.  His habitual reticence springs mainly from real, inward strength of nature; but partly also from that same unsocial pride which lays him so broadly open to the arts of sycophancy, and thus draws him, as if spellbound, under the tainted breath of that strange compound of braggart, liar, and fop.