Shakspeare, however, was not content to let Portia rest her plea for
confidence on the essential nature of the marriage bond:
"I grant I am a woman; but withal,
A woman that lord Brutus took to wife.
I grant I am a woman; but withal,
A woman well reputed--Cato's daughter.
Think you I am _no stronger than my sex_,
Being so fathered and so husbanded?"
And afterward in the very scene where Brutus is suffering under that
"insupportable and touching loss," the death of his wife, Cassius
pleads--
"Have you not love enough to bear with me,
When that rash humor which my mother gave me
Makes me forgetful?
_Brutus_.--Yes, Cassius, and henceforth,
When you are over-earnest with your Brutus,
He'll think your mother chides, and leaves you so."
As indeed it was a frequent belief among the ancients, as with our
Indians, that the _body_ was inherited from the mother, the
_soul_ from the father. As in that noble passage of Ovid, already
quoted, where Jupiter, as his divine synod are looking down on the
funeral pyre of Hercules, thus triumphs--
"Neo nisi _materna_ Vulcanum parte potentem,
Sentiet. Aeternum est, a me quod traxit, et expers
Atque immune neois, nullaque domabile flamma
Idque ego defunctum terra coelestibus oris
Accipiam, cunctisque meum laetabile factum
Dis fore confido.
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