ee, yields the strongest motives to virtue; if not, to vice.

As for his falsehood, or rather string of falsehoods, this is indeed
a pretty dark passage. The guilty passion with which he is caught
betrays him into a course of action still more guilty: he is
entangled, almost before he knows it, in a net of vile intrigue, from
which there is no escape but by lying his way out; and the more he
struggles to get free the more he gets engaged. It seems an earnest of
"the staggers and the cureless lapse of youth" with which the King has
threatened him. But he pays a round penalty in the shame that so
quickly overtakes him; which shows how careful the Poet was to make
due provision for his amendment. His original fault, as already noted,
was an overweening pride of birth: yet in due time he unfolds in
himself better titles to honour than ancestry can bestow; and, this
done, he naturally grows more willing to recognize similar titles in
another. It is to be noted further, that Bertram is all along a man of
few words; which may be one reason why Parolles, who is all words, as
his name imports, _burrs_ upon him and works his infection into him
with such signal success. His habitual reticence springs mainly from
real, inward strength of nature; but partly also from that same
unsocial pride which lays him so broadly open to the arts of
sycophancy, and thus draws him, as if spellbound, under the tainted
breath of that strange compound of braggart, liar, and fop.

Thus Shakespeare purposely represents Bertram as a very mixed
character, in whom the evil gains for some time a most unhopeful
mastery; and he takes care to provide, withal, the canon whereby he
would have him judged: "The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good
and ill together: our virtues would be proud, if our faults whipp'd
them not; and our crimes would despair, if they were not cherished by
our virtues." A pregnant and subtile reflection indeed, which may
sound strange to many; but the truth and wisdom of it are well
approved by the grave and saintly Hooker, who was "not afraid to
affirm it boldly," that proud men sometimes "receive a benefit at the
hands of God, and are assisted with His grace, when with His grace
they are not assisted, but permitted, and that grievously, to
transgress; whereby, as they were in overgreat liking of themselves
supplanted, so the dislike of that which did supplant them may
establish them afterwards the surer."

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