oppression. It is idle to criticize her dissembling submission to her
father and mother; a higher duty has taken place of that which she owed
to them; a more sacred tie has severed all others. Her parents are
pictured as they are, that no feeling for them may interfere in the
slightest degree with our sympathy for the lovers. In the mind of Juliet
there is no struggle between her filial and her conjugal duties, and
there ought to be none. The Friar, her spiritual director, dismisses her
with these instructions:--

Go home,--be merry,--give consent
To marry Paris;

and she obeys him. Death and suffering in every horrid form she is ready
to brave, without fear or doubt, "to live an unstained wife:" and the
artifice to which she has recourse, which she is even instructed to use,
in no respect impairs the beauty of the character; we regard it with
pain and pity; but excuse it, as the natural and inevitable consequence
of the situation in which she is placed. Nor should we forget, that the
dissimulation, as well as the courage of Juliet, though they spring from
passion, are justified by principle:--

My husband is on earth, my faith in heaven;
How shall my faith return again to earth,
Unless that husband send it me from heaven?

In her successive appeals to her father, her mother, her nurse, and the
Friar, she seeks those remedies which would first suggest themselves to
a gentle and virtuous nature, and grasps her dagger only as the last
resource against dishonor and violated faith;--

God join'd my heart with Romeo's,--thou our hands.
And ere this hand, by thee to Romeo seal'd,
Shall be the label to another deed,
Or my true heart with treacherous revolt
Turn to another,--_this_ shall slay them both!

Thus, in the very tempest and whirlwind of passion and terror,
preserving, to a certain degree, that moral and feminine dignity which
harmonizes with our best feelings, and commands our unreproved sympathy.

I reserve my remarks on the catastrophe, which demands separate
consideration; and return to trace from the opening, another and
distinguishing trait in Juliet's character.

In the extreme vivacity of her imagination, and its influence upon the
action, the language, the sentiments of the drama, Juliet resembles
Portia; but with this striking difference. In Portia, the imaginative
power, though developed in a high degree, is so equally blended with the
other intellectual and