ns to
speak; of those which have been handed down to us by many different
authorities under different aspects we cannot judge without prejudice;
in others there occur certain chasms which it is difficult to supply;
and hence inconsistencies we have no means of reconciling, though
doubtless they _might_ be reconciled if we knew the whole, instead of a
part.

MEDON.

But instance--instance!

ALDA.

Examples crowd upon me; but take the first that occurs. Do you remember
that Duchesse de Longueville, whose beautiful picture we were looking at
yesterday?--the heroine of the Fronde?--think of that woman--bold,
intriguing, profligate, vain, ambitious, factious!--who made men rebels
with a smile;--or if that were not enough, the lady was not scrupulous,
apparently without principle as without shame, nothing was _too_ much!
And then think of the same woman protecting the virtuous philosopher
Arnauld, when he was denounced and condemned; and from motives which her
worst enemies could not malign, secreting him in her house, unknown even
to her own servants--preparing his food herself, watching for his
safety, and at length saving him. Her tenderness, her patience, her
discretion, her disinterested benevolence, not only defied danger, (that
were little to a woman of her temper,) but endured a lengthened trial,
all the ennui caused by the necessity of keeping her house, continual
self-control, and the thousand small daily sacrifices which, to a vain,
dissipated, proud, impatient woman, must have been hard to bear. Now if
Shakspeare had drawn the character of the Duchesse de Longueville, he
would have shown us the same individual woman in both situations:--for
the same being, with the same faculties, and passions, and powers, it
surely was: whereas in history, we see in one case a fury of discord, a
woman without modesty or pity; and in the other an angel of
benevolence, and a worshipper of goodness; and nothing to connect the
two extremes in our fancy.

MEDON.

But these are contradictions which we meet on every page of history,
which make us giddy with doubt, or sick with belief, and are the proper
subjects of inquiry for the moralist and the philosopher.

ALDA.

I cannot say that professed moralists and philosophers did much to help
_me_ out of the dilemma; but the riddle which history presented I found
solved in the pages of Shakspeare. The