I confess they are not altogether such as I should wish them to have
been; but I can see no good cause why prurient inference or
speculation should busy itself in going behind them. If, however,
conjecture must be at work on those facts, surely it had better run in
the direction of charity, especially as regards the weaker vessel. I
say weaker vessel, because in this case the man must in common
fairness be supposed to have had the advantage at least as much in
natural strength of understanding as the woman had in years. And as
Shakespeare was, by all accounts, a very attractive person, it is not
quite clear why she had not as good a right to lose her heart in his
company as he had to lose his in hers. Probably she was as much
smitten as he was; and we may well remember in her behalf, that love's
"favourite seat is feeble woman's breast"; especially as there is not
a particle of evidence that her life after marriage was ever otherwise
than clear and honourable. And indeed it will do no hurt to remember
in reference to them both, how

"'Tis affirmed
By poets skilled in Nature's secret ways,
That Love will not submit to be controlled
By mastery."

In support of his view, Mr. White urges, among other things, that most
foul and wicked fling which Leontes, in his mad rapture of jealousy,
makes against his wife, in Act i. scene 2, of _The Winter's Tale_. He
thinks the Poet could not have written that and other strains of like
import, but that he was stung into doing so by his own bitter
experience of "sorrow and shame"; and the argument is that, supposing
him to have had such a root of bitterness in his life, he must have
been thinking of that while writing those passages. The obvious answer