own virtue, and not by inheriting it from the virtue of others.  So, in her breast, “adoption strives with nature”; and, weighing the adopted and the native together in her motherly judgment, she finds “there’s nothing here too good for him but only she”; and “which of them both is dearest to her, she has no skill in sense to make distinction.”  Withal she is a charming instance of youth carried on into age; so that Helena justly recognizes her as one “whose aged honour cites a virtuous youth.”  Thus her Winter inherits a soft warm robe of precious memories woven out of her Spring:  when she first learns of the heroine’s state of mind, the picture of her own May revives to her eye, the treasure of her maiden years blooms afresh; she remembers that “this thorn doth to our rose of youth rightly belong”; and has more than ever a mother’s heart towards the silent sufferer, because she holds fast her old faith that

    “It is the show and seal of nature’s truth,
    Where love’s strong passion is impress’d in youth.”

Well might Campbell say of her, that “she redeems nobility by reverting to nature.”

* * * * *

Johnson delivers his mind touching the young Count as follows:  “I cannot reconcile my heart to Bertram;—­a man noble without generosity, and young without truth; who marries Helena as a coward, and leaves her as a profligate:  when she is dead by his unkindness, sneaks home to a second marriage; is accused by a woman he has wronged, defends himself by falsehood, and is dismissed to happiness.”  A terrible sentence indeed! and its vigour, if not its justice, is attested by the frequency with which it has been quoted.

Now, in the first place, the Poet did not mean we should reconcile our hearts to Bertram, but that he should not unreconcile them to Helena; nay, that her love should appear the nobler for the unworthiness of its object.  Then, he does not marry her as a coward, but merely because he has no choice; nor does he yield till he has shown all the courage that were compatible with discretion.  She is forced upon him by a stretch of prerogative which seems strange indeed to us, but which in feudal times was generally held to be just and right, so that resistance to it was flat rebellion.  And, as before observed, Bertram’s purpose of stealing away to the war was bravely formed without any reference to Helena, and from a manly impulse or ambition to be doing something that might show him not unworthy of his House and his social inheritance.  The King presses him with the hard alternative of taking Helena as his wife,

    “Or I will throw thee from my care for ever
    Into the staggers and the cureless lapse
    Of youth and ignorance; both my revenge and hate
    Loosing upon thee, in the name of justice,
    Without all terms of pity.”

Nor, when thus driven to make a show of mastering his aversion, is there any thing mean or cringing in the way he does it:  his language is not only reluctant and reserved, but is even made severe with a dash of irony: