m's "dreadful sentence" against her,
she is prompt to declare, "He was my son, but I do wash his name out
of my blood, and thou art all my child"; and it is her very heart that
speaks,--

"What angel shall
Bless this unworthy husband? he cannot thrive,
Unless her prayers, which Heaven delights to hear,
And loves to grant, reprieve him from the wrath
Of greatest justice."

To the King she is "all that is virtuous"; "young, wise, fair";
"virtue and she is her own dower." Lafeu remembers her at the close as
"a sweet creature," and as one

"Whose beauty did astonish the survey
Of richest eyes; whose words all ears took captive;
Whose dear perfection hearts that scorn'd to serve
Humbly call'd mistress."

Thus she walks right into all hearts that have any doors for the
entrance of virtue and loveliness. And her modest, self-sacrificing
worth is brought home to our feelings by the impression she makes on
the good; while in turn our sense of their goodness is proportionably
heightened by their noble sensibility to hers.

Parolles, again, is puffed up into a more consequential whiffet than
ever, by being taken into the confidence of a haughty young nobleman;
while, on the other side, the stultifying effects of Bertram's pride
are seen in that it renders him the easy dupe of a most base and
bungling counterfeit of manhood. It was natural and right, that such
a shallow, paltry word-gun should ply him with impudent flatteries,
and thereby gain an ascendency over him, and finally draw him into the
crimes and the shames that were to whip down his pride; and it was
equally natural that his scorn of Helena should begin to relax, when
he was brought to see what a pitiful rascal, by playing upon that
pride, had been making a fool of him. He must first be mortified,
before he can be purified. The springs of moral health within him have
been overspread by a foul disease; and the proper medicine is such an
exposure of the latter as shall cause him to feel that he is himself a
most fit object of the scorn which he has been so forward to bestow.
Accordingly the embossing and untrussing of his favourite is the
starting of his amendment: he begins to distrust the counsels of his
cherished passion, when he can no longer hide from himself into what a
vile misplacing of trust they have betrayed him. Herein, also, we have
a full justification, both moral and dramatic, of the game