It is needless to say that the prominent feature in Mr. Hudson’s criticism is Shylock. The combination in him of the individual and the national, Shylock the Jew and the Jew Shylock, is indicated with a bold, firm hand. One paragraph is especially powerful. “Shylock,” he says, “is a true representative of his nation; wherein we have a pride which for ages never ceased to provoke hostility, but which no hostility could ever subdue; a thrift which still invited rapacity, but which no rapacity could ever exhaust; and a weakness, which, while it exposed the subjects to wrong, only deepened their hate, because it left them without the means or the hope of redress. Thus Shylock is a type of national sufferings, sympathies, and antipathies. Himself an object of bitter insult and scorn to those about him; surrounded by enemies whom he is too proud to conciliate and too weak to oppose; he can have no life among them but money; no hold upon them but interest; no indemnity out of them but revenge. Such being the case, what wonder that the elements of national greatness became congealed or petrified into malignity? As avarice was the passion in which he mainly lived, of course, the Christian virtues which thwarted this were the greatest wrong that could be done him. With these strong national traits are interwoven personal traits equally strong. Thoroughly and intensely Jewish, he is not more a Jew than he is Shylock. In his hard, icy intellectuality, and his ‘dry, mummy-like tenacity’ of purpose, with a dash now and then of biting sarcastic humor, we see the remains of a great and noble nature, out of which all the genial sap of humanity has been pressed by accumulated injuries. With as much elasticity of mind as stiffness of neck, every step he takes but the last is as firm as the earth he treads upon. Nothing can daunt, nothing disconcert him; remonstrance cannot move, ridicule cannot touch, obloquy cannot exasperate him; when he has not provoked, he has been forced to bear them; and now that he does provoke them, he is proof against them. In a word, he may be broken; he cannot be bent.”