rally, she is individualized by qualities peculiar to herself;
by her high mental powers, her enthusiasm of temperament, her decision
of purpose, and her buoyancy of spirit. These are innate; she has other
distinguishing qualities more external, and which are the result of the
circumstances in which she is placed. Thus she is the heiress of a
princely name and countless wealth; a train of obedient pleasures have
ever waited round her; and from infancy she has breathed an atmosphere
redolent of perfume and blandishment Accordingly there is a commanding
grace, a highbred, airy elegance, a spirit of magnificence in all that
she does and says, as one to whom splendor had been familiar from her
very birth. She treads as though her footsteps had been among marble
palaces, beneath roofs of fretted gold, o'er cedar floors and pavements
of jasper and porphyry--amid gardens full of statues, and flowers, and
fountains, and haunting music. She is full of penetrative wisdom, and
genuine tenderness, and lively wit; but as she has never known want, or
grief, or fear, or disappointment, her wisdom is without a touch of the
sombre or the sad; her affections are all mixed up with faith, hope and
joy; and her wit has not a particle of malevolence or causticity.

It is well known that the Merchant of Venice is founded on two different
tales; and in weaving together his double plot in so masterly a manner,
Shakspeare has rejected altogether the character of the astutious Lady
of Belmont with her magic potions, who figures in the Italian novel.
With yet more refinement, he has thrown out all the licentious part of
the story, which some of his contemporary dramatists would have seized
on with avidity, and made the best or worst of it possible; and he has
substituted the trial of the caskets from another source.[9] We are not
told expressly where Belmont is situated; but as Bassanio takes ship to
go thither from Venice, and as we find them afterwards ordering horses
from Belmont to Padua, we will imagine Portia's hereditary palace as
standing on some lovely promontory between Venice and Trieste,
overlooking the blue Adriatic, with the Friuli mountains or the Euganean
hills for its background, such as we often see in one of Claude's or
Poussin's elysian landscapes. In a scene, in a home like this,
Shakspeare, having first exorcised the original possessor, has placed
his Portia; and so endowed her, that all the wild, strange, and moving
circumsta