Shylock's vindictiveness, cancels the original appeal to
possible sympathy for his previous wrongs, and presents him as a
dangerous maniac or wild beast, from whose fury no one is safe, and whom
it is every one's interest to strike down; so that at the miserable
Jew's final defeat the whole audience gasps with a sense of unspeakable
relief. Perhaps, too, the master meant to show--at any rate he has
shown--that the deadly sin of hatred, indulged even with a cause, ends
in the dire disease of causeless hate and the rabid frenzy of a maniac.

It has sometimes been objected to this wonderful scene that Portia's
reticence and delay in relieving Antonio and her husband from their
suspense is unnatural. But Portia is a very _superior woman_, able to
control not only her own palpitating sympathy with their anguish, but
her impatient yearning to put an end to it, till she has made ever
effort to redeem the wretch whose hardness of heart fills her with
incredulous amazement--a heavenly instinct akin to the divine love that
desires not that a sinner should perish, which enables her to postpone
her own relief and that of those precious to her till she has exhausted
endeavor to soften Shylock; and Shakespeare thus not only justifies the
stern severity of her ultimate sentence on him, but shows her endowed
with the highest powers of self-command, and patient, long-suffering
with evil; her teasing her husband half to death afterward restores the
balance of her humanity, which was sinking heavily toward perfection.

Bryan Waller Procter, dear Barry Cornwall--beloved by all who knew him,
even his fellow-poets, for his sweet, gentle disposition--had married
(as I have said elsewhere) Anne Skepper, the daughter of our friend,
Mrs. Basil Montague. They were among our most intimate and friendly
acquaintance. Their house was the resort of all the choice spirits of
the London society of their day, her pungent epigrams and brilliant
sallies making the most delightful contrast imaginable to the cordial
kindness of his conversation and the affectionate tenderness of his
manner; she was like a fresh lemon--golden, fragrant, firm, and
wholesome--and he was like the honey of Hymettus; they were an
incomparable compound.

The play which I spoke of as his, in my last letter, was Ford's "White
Devil," of which the notorious Vittoria Corrombona, Duchess of
Bracciano, is the heroine. The powerful but coarse treatment of the
Italian story by the Elizab