of a man; the redemption, if there be any, is by the wisdom and
virtue of a woman, and, failing that, there is none. The
catastrophe of King Lear is owing to his own want of judgment, his
impatient vanity, his misunderstanding of his children; the virtue
of his one true daughter would have saved him from all the injuries
of the others, unless he had cast her away from him; as it is, she
all but saves him.

Of Othello I need not trace the tale;--nor the one weakness of his
so mighty love; nor the inferiority of his perceptive intellect to
that even of the second woman character in the play, the Emilia who
dies in wild testimony against his error:-


"Oh, murderous coxcomb! what should such a fool
Do with so good a wife?"


In Romeo and Juliet, the wise and brave stratagem of the wife is
brought to ruinous issue by the reckless impatience of her husband.
In Winter's Tale, and in Cymbeline, the happiness and existence of
two princely households, lost through long years, and imperilled to
the death by the folly and obstinacy of the husbands, are redeemed
at last by the queenly patience and wisdom of the wives. In Measure
for Measure, the foul injustice of the judge, and the foul cowardice
of the brother, are opposed to the victorious truth and adamantine
purity of a woman. In Coriolanus, the mother's counsel, acted upon
in time, would have saved her son from all evil; his momentary
forgetfulness of it is his ruin; her prayer, at last granted, saves
him--not, indeed, from death, but from the curse of living as the