But what is most remarkable of all in Caliban is the perfect originality of his thoughts and manners.  Though framed of grossness and malignity, there is nothing vulgar or commonplace about him.  His whole character indeed is developed from within, not impressed from without; the effect of Prospero’s instructions having been to make him all the more himself; and there being perhaps no soil in his nature for conventional vices and knaveries to take root and grow in.  Hence the almost classic dignity of his behaviour compared with that of the drunken sailors, who are little else than a sort of low, vulgar conventionalities organized, and as such not less true to the life than consistent with themselves.  In his simplicity, indeed, he at first mistakes them for gods who “bear celestial liquor,” and they wax merry enough at the “credulous monster”; but, in his vigour of thought and purpose, he soon conceives such a scorn of their childish interest in whatever trinkets and gewgaws meet their eye, as fairly drives off his fit of intoxication; and the savage of the woods, half-human though he be, seems nobility itself beside the savages of the city.

In fine, if Caliban is, so to speak, the organized sediment and dregs of the place, from which all the finer spirit has been drawn off to fashion the delicate Ariel, yet having some parts of a human mind strangely interwoven with his structure; every thing about him, all that he does and says, is suitable and correspondent to such a constitution of nature.  So that all the elements and attributes of his being stand and work together in living coherence, thus rendering him no less substantive and personal to our apprehension than he is original and peculiar in himself.

* * * * *

Such are the objects and influences amidst which the clear, placid nature of Miranda has been developed.  Of the world whence her father was driven, its crimes and follies and sufferings, she knows nothing; he having studiously kept all such notices from her, to the end, apparently, that nothing might thwart or hinder the plastic efficacies that surrounded her.  And here all the simple and original elements of her being, love, light, grace, honour, innocence, all pure feelings and tender sympathies, whatever is sweet and gentle and holy in womanhood, seem to have sprung up in her nature as from celestial seed:  “the contagion of the world’s slow stain” has not visited her; the chills and cankers of artificial wisdom have not touched nor come nigh her:  if there were any fog or breath of evil in the place that might else dim or spot her soul, it has been sponged up by Caliban, as being more congenial with his nature; while he is simply “a villain she does not love to look on.”  Nor is this all.  The aerial music beneath which her soul has expanded with answering sweetness seems to rest visibly upon her, linking her as it were with some superior order of beings:  the spirit and genius of the place, its magic and mystery,