tive drawing-back of female delicacy, touching our sympathies,
and causing us to feel most deeply what she is, when those with whom
she is playing least suspect her to be other than she seems. And the
same is true concerning her passion, of which she never so speaks as
to compromise in the least the delicacies and proprieties of her sex;
yet she lets fall many things from which the Duke easily gathers the
drift and quality of her feelings directly he learns what she is. But
the great charm of her character lies in a moral rectitude so perfect
and so pure as to be a secret unto itself; a clear, serene composure
of truth, mingling so freely and smoothly with the issues of life,
that while, and perhaps even because she is herself unconscious of it,
she is never once tempted to abuse or to shirk her trust, though it be
to play the attorney in a cause that makes so much against herself. In
this respect she presents an instructive contrast to Malvolio, who has
much virtue indeed, yet not so much but that the counter-pullings have
rendered him intensely conscious of it, and so drawn him into the
vice, at once hateful and ridiculous, of moral pride. The virtue that
fosters conceit and censoriousness is like a dyspeptic stomach, the
owner of which is made all too sensible of it by the conversion of his
food to wind,--a wind that puffs him up. On the other hand, a virtue
that breathes so freely as not to be aware of its breathing is the
right moral analogue of a thoroughly eupeptic state; as "the healthy
know not of their health, but only the sick."

Sundry critics have censured, some of them pretty sharply, the
improbability involved in the circumstance of Viola and Sebastian
resembling each other so closely as to be mistaken the one for the
other. Even so just and liberal a critic as Hallam has stumbled at
this circumstance, so much so as quite to disconcert his judgment of
the play. The improbability is indeed palpable enough; yet I have to
confess that it has never troubled me, any more than certain things
not less improbable in _As You Like It_. But even if it had, still I
should not hold it any just ground for faulting the Poet, inasmuch as
the circumstance was an accepted article in the literary faith of his
time. But indeed this censure proceeds from that old heresy which
supposes the proper effect of a work of art to depend on the imagined
reality of the matter presented; that is, which substitutes the
delusions of insan