Shakespeare knew,—­none better,—­that in order to be a lover in any right sense of the term, one must first be a man.  He therefore does not leave the Prince without an opportunity to show that he is such.  And it is not till after the King has revealed himself, and blown up the mirth of the feast by his explosion of wrath, that the Prince displays his proper character in this respect.  I need not stay to remark how well the Poet orders the action for that purpose; suffice it to say that the Prince then fully makes good his previous declaration: 

      “Were I crown’d the most imperial monarch,
    Thereof most worthy; were I the fairest youth
    That ever made eye swerve; had force and knowledge
    More than was ever man’s; I would not prize them,
    Without her love; for her employ them all;
    Commend them or condemn them to her service,
    Or to their own perdition.”

The minor characters of this play are both well conceived and skilfully disposed, the one giving them a fair personal, the other a fair dramatic interest.  The old Shepherd and his clown of a son are near, if not in, the Poet’s happiest comic vein.  Autolycus, the “snapper-up of unconsidered trifles,” is the most amiable and ingenious rogue we should desire to see; who cheats almost as divinely as those about him love, and whose thieving tricks the very gods seem to crown with thrift in reward of his wit.  His self-raillery and droll soliloquizing give us the feeling that his sins are committed not so much for lucre as for fun.—­The Poet was perhaps a little too fond of placing his characters in situations where they have to be false in order to be the truer; which no doubt sometimes happens; yet, surely, in so delicate a point of morality, some care is needful, lest the exceptions become too much for the rule.  And something too much of this there may be in the honest, upright, yet deceiving old lord, Camillo.  I speak this under correction; for I know it is not safe to fault Shakespeare’s morals; and that they who affect a better morality than his are very apt to turn out either hypocrites or moral coxcombs.  As for the rest, this Camillo, though little more than a staff in the drama, is nevertheless a pillar of State; his integrity and wisdom making him a light to the counsels and a guide to the footsteps of the greatest around him.  Fit to be the stay of princes, he is one of those venerable relics of the past which show us how beautiful age can be, and which, linking together different generations, format once the salt of society and the strength of government.

I have never seen this play on the stage; but I can well understand how the scene with the painted statue, if fairly delivered, might be surpassingly effective.  The illusion is all on the understandings of the spectators; and they seem to feel the power without the fact of animation, or to have a sense of mobility in a vision of fixedness.  And such is the magic of the scene, that we almost fancy them turning into marble, as they fancy the marble turning into flesh.