Such is Hermione, in her “proud submission,” her “dignified obedience,” with her Roman firmness and integrity of soul, heroic in strength, heroic in gentleness, the queenliest of women, the womanliest of queens.  She is perhaps the Poet’s best illustration of the great principle, which I fear is not so commonly felt as it should be, that the highest beauty always has an element or shade of the terrible in it, so that it awes you while it attracts.

“If I prove honey-mouth’d, let my tongue blister,
And never to my red-look’d anger be
The trumpet any more.”

“Good Queen, my lord, good Queen; I say, good Queen,
And would by combat make her good, so were I
A man, the worst about you.”

                                  “For ever
    Unvenerable be thy hands, if thou
    Tak’st up the Princess by that forced baseness
    Which he has put upon ’t.”

Such are some of the words that boil over from the stout heart of Paulina,—­the noblest and most amiable termagant we shall anywhere find,—­when, with the new-born babe in charge, she confronts the furious King.  He threatens to have her burnt, and she replies instantly,—­

                        “I care not: 
    It is an heretic that makes the fire,
    Not she which burns in ’t.”

If her faults were a thousand times greater than they are, I could pardon them all for this one little speech; which proves that Shakespeare was, I will not say a Protestant, but a true Christian, intellectually at least, and far deeper in the spirit of his religion than a large majority of the Church’s official organs were in his day, or, let me add, have been any day since.  And this was written, be it observed, at a time when the embers of the old ecclesiastical fires were not yet wholly extinct, and when many a priestly bigot was deploring the lay ascendency which kept them from being rekindled.

Paulina makes a superb counterpart to Hermione, heightening the effect of her character by the most emphatic contrast, and at the same time reflecting it by her intense and outspoken sympathy.  Without any of the Queen’s dignified calmness and reserve, she is alive to all her inward beauty and greatness:  with a head to understand and a heart to reverence such a woman, she unites a temper to fight, a generosity to die for her.  But no language but her own can fitly measure the ardour with which she loves and admires and even adores her “dearest, sweetest mistress,” whose power has indeed gone all through her, so that every part of her nature cannot choose but speak it, when the occasion kindles her.  Loud, voluble, violent, and viraginous, with a tongue sharper than a sword, and an eloquence that fairly blisters where it hits, she has, therewithal, too much honour and magnanimity and kind feeling either to use them without good cause, or to forbear using them at all hazards when she has such cause.  Mrs. Jameson classes her, and justly, no doubt, among those women—­and she assures us there are many such—­who seem regardless of the feelings of those for whom they would sacrifice their life.