all tenderness, all
truth! But, alas! to see her fluttering like a cherub in the talons of a
fiend!--to see her--O poor Desdemona!

IMOGEN.

We come to Imogen. Others of Shakspeare's characters are, as dramatic
and poetical conceptions, more striking, more brilliant, more powerful;
but of all his women, considered as individuals rather than as heroines,
Imogen is the most perfect. Portia and Juliet are pictured to the fancy
with more force of contrast, more depth of light and shade; Viola and
Miranda, with more aerial delicacy of outline; but there is no female
portrait that can be compared to Imogen as a woman--none in which so
great a variety of tints are mingled together into such perfect harmony.
In her, we have all the fervor of youthful tenderness, all the romance
of youthful fancy, all the enchantment of ideal grace,--the bloom of
beauty, the brightness of intellect and the dignity of rank, taking a
peculiar hue from the conjugal character which is shed over all, like a
consecration and a holy charm. In Othello and the Winter's Tale, the
interest excited for Desdemona and Hermione is divided with others: but
in Cymbeline, Imogen is the angel of light, whose lovely presence
pervades and animates the whole piece. The character altogether may be
pronounced finer, more complex in its elements, and more fully developed
in all its parts, than those of Hermione and Desdemona; but the position
in which she is placed is not, I think, so fine--at least, not so
effective, as a tragic situation.

Shakspeare has borrowed the chief circumstances of Imogen's story from
one of Boccaccio's tales.[55]

A company of Italian merchants who are assembled in a tavern at Paris,
are represented as conversing on the subject of their wives: all of them
express themselves with levity, or skepticism, or scorn, on the virtue
of women, except a young Genoese merchant named Bernabo, who maintains,
that by the especial favor of Heaven he possesses a wife no less chaste
than beautiful. Heated by the wine, and excited by the arguments and the
coarse raillery of another young merchant, Ambrogiolo, Bernabo proceeds
to enumerate the various perfections and accomplishments of his Zinevra.
He praises her loveliness, her submission, and her discretion--her skill
in embroidery, her graceful service, in which the best trained page of
the court could not exceed her; and he adds, as rarer accomplishments,
that she could mount a horse, fly a hawk, writ