And heavenly Una with her milk-white lamb.’
We have said enough to explain our idea of the general turn of Shakespear’s female characters. We need not mention Ophelia or Cordelia, both of which admit of little external decoration, and which it would seem impossible to treat in any other way than as Shakespear has represented them, abstracted from every thing but their heart-breaking ties to others, if Tate had not adorned the person of Cordelia with a number of beauties, and finished her story with a lover. Cleopatra, who has certainly a personal identity of her own, and who is described in all the glowing pomp of eastern luxury, is not an exception to what we have said, for she is not intended as a model of her sex. What we best recollect of Cressida, is Pandarus’s description of her after bringing her to the tent, where he says,—‘And her heart beats like a new-ta’en sparrow’—which must be allowed to be quite Shakesperian. Miranda appears to be the most conscious of her charms of any of his favourites (perhaps from the very solitude in which she had lived), a sort of miracle of her father’s island, and the goddess of her new-found lover’s idolatry. Perdita is a very pretty low-born lass, the Queen of curds and cream—but she makes us think of other things more than of her face. There is one passage in which the poet has, we suspect, very artfully rallied the indifference of the sex to abstract reasoning:
‘Perdita. Sir, the fairest flowers o’ th’ season
Are our carnations, and streak’d gilly-flowers,
Which some call Nature’s bastards: of that kind
Our rustic garden’s barren, and I care not
To get slips of them.
Polixenes. Wherefore, gentle maiden,
Do you neglect them?
Perdita. For I have heard it said,