It has sometimes been objected to this wonderful scene that Portia’s reticence and delay in relieving Antonio and her husband from their suspense is unnatural.  But Portia is a very superior woman, able to control not only her own palpitating sympathy with their anguish, but her impatient yearning to put an end to it, till she has made ever effort to redeem the wretch whose hardness of heart fills her with incredulous amazement—­a heavenly instinct akin to the divine love that desires not that a sinner should perish, which enables her to postpone her own relief and that of those precious to her till she has exhausted endeavor to soften Shylock; and Shakespeare thus not only justifies the stern severity of her ultimate sentence on him, but shows her endowed with the highest powers of self-command, and patient, long-suffering with evil; her teasing her husband half to death afterward restores the balance of her humanity, which was sinking heavily toward perfection.

Bryan Waller Procter, dear Barry Cornwall—­beloved by all who knew him, even his fellow-poets, for his sweet, gentle disposition—­had married (as I have said elsewhere) Anne Skepper, the daughter of our friend, Mrs. Basil Montague.  They were among our most intimate and friendly acquaintance.  Their house was the resort of all the choice spirits of the London society of their day, her pungent epigrams and brilliant sallies making the most delightful contrast imaginable to the cordial kindness of his conversation and the affectionate tenderness of his manner; she was like a fresh lemon—­golden, fragrant, firm, and wholesome—­and he was like the honey of Hymettus; they were an incomparable compound.

The play which I spoke of as his, in my last letter, was Ford’s “White Devil,” of which the notorious Vittoria Corrombona, Duchess of Bracciano, is the heroine.  The powerful but coarse treatment of the Italian story by the Elizabethan playwright has been chastened into something more adapted to modern taste by Barry Cornwall; but, even with his kindred power and skillful handling, the work of the early master retained too rough a flavor for the public palate of our day, and very reluctantly the project of bringing it out was abandoned.

The tragical story of Vittoria Corrombona, eminently tragical in that age of dramatic lives and deaths, has furnished not only the subject of this fine play of Ford’s, but that of a magnificent historical novel, by the great German writer, Tieck, in which it is difficult to say which predominates, the intense interest of the heroine’s individual career, or that created by the splendid delineation of the whole state of Italy at that period—­the days of the grand old Sixtus the Fifth in Rome, and of the contemporary Medici in Florence; it is altogether a masterpiece by a great master.  Superior in tragic horror, because unrelieved by the general picture of contemporaneous events, but quite inferior as a work of imagination, is the comparatively short sketch