ce 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 forego 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 purpose, 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 Shakspeare'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 back-ground. 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.

We have almost as great an affection for Imogen as she had for Posthumus;
and she deserves it better. Of all Shakspeare's women she is perhaps the
most tender and the most artless. Her incredulity in the opening scene
with Iachimo, as to her husband's infidelity, is much the same as
Desdemona's backwardness to believe Othello's jealousy. Her answer to the
most distressing part of the picture is only, "My lord, I fear, has forgot
Britain." Her readiness to pardon Iachimo's false imputations and his
designs against herself, is a good lesson to prudes; and may shew that
where there is a real attachment to virtue, it has no need to bolster
itself up with an outrageous or affected antipathy to vice. The scene in
which Pisanio gives Imogen his master's letter, accusing-her of
incontinency on the treacherous suggestions of Iachimo, is as touching as
it is possible for anything to be:--

"_Pisanio._ What cheer, Madam?

_Imogen._ False to his bed! What is it to be false?
To lie in watch there, and to think on him?
To weep 'twixt clock and clock? If sleep charge nature,
To break it with a fearful dream of him,
And cry myself awake? That's false to 's bed, is it?

_Pisanio._ Alas, good lady!

_Imogen._ I false? thy