So that in his seeming abruptness Leontes, after all, does but exemplify the strange transformations which sometimes occur in men upon sudden and unforeseen emergencies.  And it is observable that the very slightness of the Queen’s indiscretion, the fact that she goes but a little, a very little too far, only works against her, causing the King to suspect her of great effort and care to avoid suspicion.  And on the same principle, because he has never suspected her before, therefore he suspects her all the more vehemently now:  that his confidence has hitherto stood unshaken, he attributes to extreme artfulness on her part; for even so, to an ill-disposed mind perfect innocence is apt to give an impression of consummate art.  A passion thus groundless and self-generated might well be full-grown as soon as born.  The more greedy and craving, too, that it has nothing real to eat; it therefore proceeds at once to “make the meat it feeds on,” causing him to magnify whatever he sees, and to imagine many things that are not.  That jealousy, however, is not the habit of his mind, appears in that it finds him unprepared, and takes him by surprise; insomuch that he forthwith loses all self-control, and runs right athwart the rules of common decency and decorum, so that he becomes an object at once of pity, of hatred, and scorn.

I think the Poet hardly anywhere shows a keener and juster insight of nature than in the behaviour of this man while the distemper is upon him.  He is utterly reason-proof, and indeed acts as one literally insane.  For the poison infects not only his manners, but his very modes of thought:  in fact, all his rational and imaginative forces, even his speech and language, seem to have caught the disease.  And all the loathsome filth which had settled to the bottom of his nature is now shaken up to the surface, so that there appears to be nothing but meanness and malignity and essential coarseness in him.  Meanwhile an instinctive shame of his passion and a dread of vulgar ridicule put him upon talking in dark riddles and enigmas:  hence the confused, broken, and disjointed style, an odd jumble of dialogue and soliloquy, in which he tries to jerk out his thoughts, as if he would have them known, and yet not have them known.  I believe men generally credit themselves with peculiar penetration when they are in the act of being deluded, whether by themselves or by others.  Hence, again, the strange and even ludicrous conceit in which Leontes wraps himself.  “Not noted, is ’t,” says he, referring to the Queen’s imaginary crime,—­

                     “not noted, is ’t,

But of the finer natures? by some severals
Of head-piece extraordinary? lower messes,
Perchance, are to this business purblind.”

Thus he mistakes his madness for a higher wisdom, and clothes his delusion with the spirit of revelation; so that Camillo rightly says,—­

                  “You may as well
    Forbid the sea for to obey the Moon
    As or by oath remove or counsel shake
    The fabric of his folly, whose foundation
    Is pil’d upon his faith.”