writings, and that too whether in dealing with ideal or with actual women; which suggests that in what they chose to create they were a good deal influenced by what they were accustomed to see.  For in a thing that works so much from the sympathies, it could hardly be but that they reflected the mind and spirit of their age.  Of this the aptest illustration that my reading has lighted upon is in Ben Jonson’s lines on the Countess of Bedford, describing “what kind of creature I could most desire to honour, serve, and love”: 

    “I meant to make her fair, and free, and wise,
    Of greatest blood, and yet more good than great;
    I meant the day-star should not brighter rise,
    Nor lend like influence from his lucent seat: 
    I meant she should be courteous, facile, sweet,
    Hating that solemn vice of greatness, pride;
    I meant each softest virtue there should meet,
    Fit in that softer bosom to reside: 
    Only a learned and a manly soul
    I purpos’d her; that should with even powers
    The rock, the spindle, and the shears control
    Of Destiny, and spin her own free hours.”

That Shakespeare fully shared in this magnanimous bravery of sentiment, we need no further proof than is furnished in the heroine of this play.  We can scarce call Hermione sweet or gentle, though she is both; she is a noble woman,—­one whom, even in her greatest anguish, we hardly dare to pity.  The whole figure is replete with classic grace, is shaped and finished in the highest style of classic art.  As she acts the part of a statue in the play, so she has a statue-like calmness and firmness of soul.  A certain austere sweetness pervades her whole demeanour, and seems, as it were, the essential form of her life.  It is as if some masterpiece of ancient sculpture had warmed and quickened into life from its fulness of beauty and expression.

Appearing at first as the cheerful hostess of her husband’s friend, and stooping from her queenly elevation to the most winning affabilities, her behaviour rises in dignity as her sorrow deepens.  With an equal sense of what is due to the King as her husband, and to herself as a woman, a wife, and a mother, she knows how to reconcile all these demands; she therefore resists without violence, and submits without weakness.  And what her wise spirit sees to be fit and becoming, that she always has strength and steadiness of character to do:  hence, notwithstanding the insults and hardships wantonly put upon her, she still preserves the smoothnesses of peace; is never betrayed into the least sign of anger or impatience or resentment, but maintains, throughout, perfect order and fitness and proportion in act and speech:  the charge, so dreadful in itself, and so cruel in its circumstances, neither rouses her passions, as it would Paulina’s, nor stuns her sensibilities, as in the case of Desdemona; but, like the sinking of lead in the ocean’s