ry religion of love. She all along relies on her
personal charms, which she fears may have been eclipsed by some painted
Jay of Italy; she relies on her merit, and her merit is in the depth of
her love, her truth and constancy. Our admiration of her beauty is excited
with as little consciousness as possible on her part. There are two
delicious descriptions given of her, one when she is asleep, and one when
she is supposed dead. Arviragus thus addresses her--

----"With fairest flowers,
While summer lasts, and I live here, Fidele,
I'll sweeten thy sad grave; thou shalt not lack
The flow'r that's like thy face, pale primrose, nor
The azur'd hare-bell, like thy veins, no, nor
The leaf of eglantine, which not to slander,
Out-sweeten'd not thy breath."

The yellow Iachimo gives another thus, when he steals into her
bedchamber:--

----"Cytherea,
How bravely thou becom'st thy bed! Fresh lily,
And whiter than the sheets! That I might touch--
But kiss, one kiss--'Tis her breathing that
Perfumes the chamber thus: the flame o' th' taper
Bows toward her, and would under-peep her lids
To see th' enclosed lights now canopied
Under the windows, white and azure, laced
With blue of Heav'ns own tinct--on her left breast
A mole cinque-spotted, like the crimson drops
I' th' bottom of a cowslip."

There is a moral sense in the proud beauty of this last image, a rich
surfeit of the fancy,--as that well-known passage beginning, "Me of my
lawful pleasure she restrained, and prayed me oft forbearance," sets a
keener edge upon it by the inimitable picture of modesty and self-denial.

The character of Cloten, the conceited, booby lord, and rejected lover of
Imogen, though not very agreeable in itself, and at present obsolete, is
drawn with much humour and quaint extravagance. The description which
Imogen gives of his unwelcome addresses to her--"Whose love-suit hath been
to me as fearful as a siege"--is enough to cure the most ridiculous lover
of his folly. It is remarkable that though Cloten makes so poor a figure
in love, he is described as assuming an air of consequence as the Queen's
son in a council of state, and with all the absurdity of his person and
manners, is not without shrewdness in his observations. So true is it that
folly is as often owing to a want of proper sentiments as to a want of
understanding! The exclamation of the ancient critic--Oh Menander and
Nat