I should like to see the masculine
lawyer that could premeditate any thing equal to them. It is to be
noted withal that she goes about her work without the least misgiving
as to the result; having so thoroughly booked herself both in the
facts and the law of the case as to feel perfectly sure on that point.
Hence the charming ease and serenity with which she moves amid the
excitements of the trial. No trepidations of anxiety come in to
disturb the preconcerted order and method of her course. And her
solemn appeals to the Jew are made in the earnest hope of inducing him
to accept a full and liberal discharge of the debt. When she says to
him, "there's thrice thy money offer'd thee," it is because she really
feels that both the justice of the cause and the honour of her husband
would be better served by such a payment than by the more brilliant
triumph which awaits her in case the Jew should spurn her offer.

Thus her management of the trial, throughout, is a piece of consummate
art; though of art in such a sense as presupposes perfect integrity of
soul. Hence, notwithstanding her methodical forecast and preparation,
she is as eloquent as an angel, and her eloquence, as by an
instinctive tact, knows its time perfectly. One of her strains in this
kind, her appeal to the Jew on the score of mercy, has been so often
quoted, that it would long since have grown stale, if it were possible
by any means to crush the freshness of unwithering youth out of it.
And I hope it will not be taken as any abatement of the speaker's
claim as a wise jurist, that she there carries both the head and the
heart of a ripe Christian divine into the management of her cause. Yet
her style in that speech is in perfect keeping with her habitual modes
of thought and discourse: even in her most spontaneous expressions we
have a reflex of the same intellectual physiognomy. For the mental
aptitude which she displays in the trial seems to have been the
germinal idea out of which her whole part was consistently evolved; as
the Poet's method often was, apparently, first to settle what his
persons were to do, and then to conceive and work out their characters
accordingly.

It has been said that Shakespeare's female characters are inferior to
his characters of men. Doubtless in some respects they are so; they
would not be female characters if they were not; but then in other
respects they are superior. Some people apparently hold it impossible
for man and wo