with disgust.

MEDON.

Do you remember that some of the commentators of Shakspeare have thought
it incumbent on their gallantry to express their utter contempt for the
scene between Richard and Lady Anne, as a monstrous and incredible libel
on your sex?

ALDA.

They might have spared themselves the trouble. Lady Anne is just one of
those women whom we see walking in crowds through the drawing-rooms of
the world--the puppets of habit, the fools of fortune, without any
particular inclination for vice, or any steady principle of virtue;
whose actions are inspired by vanity, not affection, and regulated by
opinion, not by conscience: who are good while there is no temptation to
be otherwise, and ready victims of the first soliciting to evil. In the
case of Lady Anne, we are startled by the situation: not three months a
widow, and following to the sepulchre the remains of a husband and a
father, she is met and wooed and won by the very man who murdered them.
In such a case it required perhaps either Richard or the arch-fiend
himself to tempt her successfully; but in a less critical moment, a far
less subtle and audacious seducer would have sufficed. Cressida is
another modification of vanity, weakness, and falsehood, drawn in
stronger colors. The world contains many Lady Annes and Cressidas,
polished and refined externally, whom chance and vanity keep right, whom
chance and vanity lead wrong, just as it may happen. When we read in
history of the enormities of certain women, perfect scarecrows and
ogresses, we can safely, like the Pharisee in Scripture, hug ourselves
in our secure virtue, and thank God that we are not as others are--but
the wicked women in Shakspeare are portrayed with such perfect
consistency and truth, that they leave us no such resource--they
frighten us into reflection--they make us believe and tremble. On the
other hand, his amiable women are touched with such exquisite
simplicity--they have so little external pretensions--and are so unlike
the usual heroines of tragedy and romance, that they delight us more
"than all the nonsense of the beau-ideal!" We are flattered by the
perception of our own nature in the midst of so many charms and virtues:
not only are they what we could wish to be, or ought to be, but what we
persuade ourselves we might be, or would be, under a different and a
happier state of things, and, perhaps, some time or other _may_ be. They
are