her to
name it from Antonio or Shylock. As an individual, Shylock is
altogether _the_ character of the play, and exhibits more of
mastership than all the others; so that, viewing the persons
severally, we should say the piece ought to be named from him. But we
have not far to seek for good reasons why it should rather be named as
it is. For if the Jew is the more important individually, the Merchant
is so dramatically. Antonio is the centre and main-spring of the
action: without him, Shylock, however great in himself, had no
business there. And the laws of dramatic combination, not any accident
of individual prominence, are clearly what ought to govern in the
naming of the play.

* * * * *

Not indeed that the Merchant is a small matter in himself; far from
it: he is a highly interesting and attractive personage; nor am I sure
but there may be timber enough in him for a good dramatic hero, apart
from the Jew. Something of a peculiar charm attaches to him, from the
state of mind in which we first see him. A dim, mysterious presage of
evil weighs down his spirits, as though he felt afar off the coming-on
of some great calamity. Yet this unwonted dejection, sweetened as it
is with his habitual kindness and good-nature, has the effect of
showing how dearly he is held by such whose friendship is the fairest
earthly purchase of virtue. And it is considerable that upon tempers
like his even the smiles of Fortune often have a strangely saddening
effect. For such a man, even because he is good, is apt to be haunted
with a sense of having more than he deserves; and this may not
unnaturally inspire him with an indefinable dread of some reverse
which shall square up the account of his present blessings. Thus his
very happiness works, by subtle methods, to charge his heart with
certain dark forebodings. So that such presentiments, whatever the
disciples of positivism may say, are in the right line of nature:

"Oft startled and made wise
By their low-breathed interpretings,
The simply-meek foretaste the springs
Of bitter contraries."

But the sorrow can hardly be ungrateful to us, that has such noble
comforters as Antonio's. Our nature is honoured in the feelings that
spring up on both sides.

Wealth indeed seldom dispenses such warnings save to its most virtuous
possessors. And such is Antonio. A kind-hearted and sweet-mannered
man; of a large and liberal spirit; affa