into the secrets of their hearts, which are more important. We are
too much interested in their affairs to stop to look at their faces,
except by stealth and at intervals. No one ever hit the true
perfection of the female character, the sense of weakness leaning on
the strength of its affections for support, so well as Shakespeare--
no one ever so well painted natural tenderness free from affectation
and disguise--no one else ever so well showed how delicacy and
timidity, when driven to extremity, grow romantic and extravagant;
for the romance of his heroines (in which they abound) is only an
excess of the habitual prejudices of their sex, scrupulous of being
false to their vows, truant to their affections, and taught by the
force of feeling when to forgo the forms of propriety for the
essence of it. His women were in this respect exquisite logicians;
for there is nothing so logical as passion. They knew their own
minds exactly; and only followed up a favourite idea, which they had
sworn to with their tongues, and which was engraven on their hearts,
into its untoward consequences. They were the prettiest little set
of martyrs and confessors on record. Cibber, in speaking of the
early English stage, accounts for the want of prominence and
theatrical display in Shakespeare's female characters from the
circumstance, that women in those days were not allowed to play the
parts of women, which made it necessary to keep them a good deal in
the background. Does not this state of manners itself, which
prevented their exhibiting themselves in public, and confined them
to the relations and charities of domestic life, afford a truer
explanation of the matter? His women are certainly very unlike
stage-heroines; the reverse of tragedy-queens.

We have almost as great an affection for Imogen as she had for
Posthumus; and she deserves it better. Of all Shakespeare's women