she is disguised.

Nor is it any drawback on her strength and substantial dignity of
character, that her nature is all overflowing with romance: rather,
this it is that glorifies her, and breathes enchantment about her; it
adds that precious seeing to the eye which conducts her to such
winning beauty and sweetness of deportment, and makes her the
"rich-souled creature" that Schlegel describes her to be. Therewithal
she may be aptly quoted as a mark-worthy instance how the Poet makes
the several parts and persons of a drama cohere not only with one
another but with the general circumstances wherein they occur. For so
in Portia's character the splendour of Italian skies and scenery and
art is reproduced; their spirit lives in her imagination, and is
complicated with all she does and says.

* * * * *

If Portia is the beauty of this play, Shylock is its strength. He is a
standing marvel of power and scope in the dramatic art; at the same
time appearing so much a man of Nature's making, that we can hardly
think of him as a creation of art. In the delineation Shakespeare had
no less a task than to fill with individual life and peculiarity the
broad, strong outlines of national character in its most revolting
form. Accordingly Shylock is a true representative of his nation;
wherein we have a pride which for ages never ceased to provoke
hostility, but which no hostility could ever subdue; a thrift which
still invited rapacity, but which no rapacity could ever exhaust; and
a weakness which, while it exposed the subjects to wrong, only
deepened their hate, because it kept them without the means or the
hope of redress. Thus Shylock is a type of national sufferings,
national sympathies, national antipathies. Himself an object of bitter
insult and scorn to those about him; surrounded by enemies whom he is
at once too proud to conciliate and too weak to oppose; he can have no
life among them but money; no hold on them but interest; no feeling
towards them but hate; no indemnity out of them but revenge. Such
being the case, what wonder that the elements of national greatness
became congealed and petrified into malignity? As avarice was the
passion in which he mainly lived, the Christian virtues that thwarted
this naturally seemed to him the greatest of wrongs.

With these strong national traits are interwoven personal traits
equally strong. Thoroughly and intensely Jewish, he is not more a Jew
than