Johnson is of opinion that Shakespeare was generally inattentive to the winding up of his plots.  We think the contrary is true; and we might cite in proof of this remark not only the present play, but the conclusion of Lear, of Romeo and Juliet, of Macbeth, of Othello, even of Hamlet, and of other plays of less moment, in which the last act is crowded with decisive events brought about by natural and striking means.

The pathos in Cymbeline is not violent or tragical, but of the most pleasing and amiable kind.  A certain tender gloom o’erspreads the whole.  Posthumus is the ostensible hero of the piece, but its greatest charm is the character of Imogen.  Posthumus is only interesting from the interest she takes in him, and she is only interesting herself from her tenderness and constancy to her husband.  It is the peculiar characteristic of Shakespeare’s heroines, that they seem to exist only in their attachment to others.  They are pure abstractions of the affections.  We think as little of their persons as they do themselves, because we are let into the secrets of their hearts, which are more important.  We are too much interested in their affairs to stop to look at their faces, except by stealth and at intervals.  No one ever hit the true perfection of the female character, the sense of weakness leaning on the strength of its affections for support, so well as Shakespeare—­ no one ever so well painted natural tenderness free from affectation and disguise—­no one else ever so well showed how delicacy and timidity, when driven to extremity, grow romantic and extravagant; for the romance of his heroines (in which they abound) is only an excess of the habitual prejudices of their sex, scrupulous of being false to their vows, truant to their affections, and taught by the force of feeling when to forgo the forms of propriety for the essence of it.  His women were in this respect exquisite logicians; for there is nothing so logical as passion.  They knew their own minds exactly; and only followed up a favourite idea, which they had sworn to with their tongues, and which was engraven on their hearts, into its untoward consequences.  They were the prettiest little set of martyrs and confessors on record.  Cibber, in speaking of the early English stage, accounts for the want of prominence and theatrical display in Shakespeare’s female characters from the circumstance, that women in those days were not allowed to play the parts of women, which made it necessary to keep them a good deal in the background.  Does not this state of manners itself, which prevented their exhibiting themselves in public, and confined them to the relations and charities of domestic life, afford a truer explanation of the matter?  His women are certainly very unlike stage-heroines; the reverse of tragedy-queens.