The "evils" have a congenial place in such a temperament: a bleaker one would discourage the finest virtues. His nature fortunately cannot be reformed, since reform would turn a most satisfactory and harmonious miscreant into a scrubby gentleman. "And that's the humor of it," as Nym would say. Shakspeare puts this rare breadth of judgment into the mouth of a woman. Imogen's step-mother, the Queen and wife of Cymbeline, is a strong-minded woman, who "bears all down with her brain." She rules the king by force or craft, and has arranged to marry Imogen to her own shallow-pated son Cloten. This ancestress of all the plotting step-mothers carries poison in her heart: her relatives may expect to find it in their food; for she is curious in distilling the essences of noxious herbs, under a scientific pretext to watch their effects in creatures not worth the hanging. But the compound that is ostensibly for rats is intended to dispossess Imogen of all her watchful liegemen, including her husband; and then, after getting her married to Cloten, the "mortal mineral" was meant to waste the King by inches to a grave that should be a royal footstool for her son. Now the King has no suspicion of the simmering deviltry that he embraced. When all her projects are discovered, he exclaims,-- "O most delicate fiend! Who is't can read a woman?" Not he, certainly; for he had been fooled in the time-honored way of crafty women. "Mine eyes Were not in fault, for she was beautiful; Mine ears, that heard her flattery; nor my heart, That thought her like her seeming." At the point of death, she confessed to her physician the whole of her unsexed intent. She never loved the King as Lady Macbeth loved her lord, but only affected the greatness got by him: she was wife to his place, but abhorred his person. Who but a woman could play that game with such an air of jaunty probability that invested her blackest kisses! Imogen's husband was a scorpion to her, ranked among the vermin which she meant to kill for pastime. And she purposed to lull the King into security by "watching, weeping, tendance, kissing," while her poison was vacating his throne. At the last, she only repented that the evils she hatched were not effected, "so, despairing, died," a martyr to an unfulfilled ideal. She is really the Lady Macbeth of the popular conception, being fiend-like from ambition. It would not have been Shakspearean if such a woman had been duplicated to furnish a wife to Macbeth. One hated with all her baffled spite, and the other loved with all her heart, her King. Shakspeare would have us notice that the clear-sighted Imogen has privately read her step-mother, and lives with suspicions for her constant warders. The King, having banished Posthumus who was secretly married to her, has turned her over to the jailership of the Queen, who tries to cajole her:--