few brief masterly strokes.
Once seen, the portrait ever after lives an old and dear acquaintance of
the reader's inner man. Portia has strength enough to do and suffer for
others, but very little for herself. As the daughter of Cato and the
wife of Brutus, she has set in her eye a pattern of how she ought to
think and act, being "so father'd and so husbanded"; but still her head
floats merged over the ears in her heart; and it is only when affection
speaks that her spirit is hushed into the listening which she would fain
yield only to the speech of reason. She has a clear idea of the stoical
calmness and fortitude which appears so noble and so graceful in her
Brutus; it all lies faithfully reproduced in her mind; she knows well
how to honor and admire it; yet she cannot work it into the texture of
her character; she can talk it like a book, but she tries in vain to
live it.

Plutarch gives one most touching incident respecting her which
Shakespeare did not use, though he transfused the sense of it into his
work. It occurred some time after Caesar's death, and when the civil war
was growing to a head: "Brutus, seeing the state of Rome would be
utterly overthrown, went ... unto the city of Elea standing by the sea.
There Portia, being ready to depart from her husband Brutus and to
return to Rome, did what she could to dissemble the grief and sorrow she
felt at her heart. But a certain painted table (picture) bewrayed her in
the end.... The device was taken out of the Greek stories, how
Andromache accompanied her husband Hector when he went out of the city
of Troy to go to the wars, and how Hector delivered her his little son,
and how her eyes were never off him. Portia, seeing this picture, and
likening herself to be in the same case, she fell a-weeping; and coming
thither oftentimes in a day to see it, she wept still." The force of
this incident is reproduced in the Portia of the play; we have its full
effect in the matter about her self-inflicted wound as compared with her
subsequent demeanor.

Portia gives herself that gash without flinching, and bears it without a
murmur, as an exercise and proof of fortitude; and she translates her
pains into smiles, all to comfort and support her husband. So long as
this purpose lends her strength, she is fully equal to her thought,
because here her heart keeps touch perfectly with her head. But, this
motive gone, the weakness, if it be not rather the strength, of her
woman's nat