Her graceful passion takes shelter in the old myth whose names personify her thought. And her style of speaking reminds us of the more polished ladies of Shakspeare's time, who delighted in the masques and revels in which the persons of the old mythology were charged to utter gallant sentiments. She is a woman of Juliet's clime, and not without her frankness; but she has been brought up in England, and her feeling and her judgment are English through and through. She has been forbidden by her father's testament to make free choice of the man whom she will love. But she could as soon be divested of her intellect as of her power and wish to love. There is not a single drop running through all her fairness that has caught a chill from the quarter of her brain where wit and wisdom ponder in their clear north light. Her mind is strong, but not the mind of a man, and with no traits more masculine than her frame itself, which is love's solicitor:-- "Here are sever'd lips, Parted with sugar breath." And even in her strict speech to Shylock we can feel the light draught of it, tempering the inclemency of her superb and unexpected threat: the Jew quails under the sentences which rain on him, golden, grave, serene. And they compel us to observe that pure sex has given the pitch to her strong, fatal wisdom. We cannot detect any thin and stridulous quality, like that of the well-gristled Duchess of Gloster, who repaid a box of the ear with these two lines:-- "Could I come near your beauty with my nails, I'd set my ten commandments in your face." If among the points of a well-nurtured woman there be those that are feline, they are generally retracted into velvet sheaths, and scarce surmised to be there till a scratch is made so silently that you have no evidence of it but your blood. But if Old Probabilities should overhear a woman blustering in a fashion as follows,-- "Though in this place most master wear no breeches, She shall not strike Dame Eleanor unreveng'd,"-- he would at once order cautionary signals. When a man scolds in the pulpit or a woman on the platform, the planets shudder, shrink, and grow more crusty. Bassanio had caught a throb from the soft breath of Portia which seemed to be a herald of the beauty he describes afterwards when the lucky lid is lifted,-- "Here in her hairs The painter plays the spider, and hath woven A golden mesh t' entrap the hearts of men, Faster than gnats in cobwebs; but her eyes! How could he see to do them? Having made one, Methinks, it should have power to steal both his, And leave itself unfurnish'd."