Page 400 - Shakespeare - Vol. 2

Scene II IT

Enter Portia with her waiting-woman, Nerissa.

PORTIA
By my troth, Nerissa, my little body is aweary of this great world.

NERISSA
You would be, sweet madam, if your miseries were in the same abundance

as your good fortunes are; and yet for aught I see, they are as sick that [5]
surfeit with too much as they that starve with nothing. It is no mean
happiness, therefore, to be seated in the mean; superfluity comes sooner by
white hairs, but competency lives longer.

PORTIA
Good sentences, and well pronounced. [10]

NERISSA
They would be better if well followed.

PORTIA
If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been
churches, and poor men’s cottages princes’ palaces. It is a good divine that
follows his own instructions. I can easier teach [15] twenty what were good
to be done than to be one of the twenty to follow mine own teaching. The

brain may devise laws for the blood, but a hot temper leaps o’er a cold
decree, such a hare is madness the youth to skip o’er the meshes of good
counsel the cripple. [20] But this reasoning is not in the fashion to choose me
a husband. O me, the word ‘choose’! I may neither choose who I would nor

refuse who I dislike, so is the will of a living daughter curbed by the will of a
dead father. Is it not hard, Nerissa, that I cannot [25] choose one, nor refuse
none?

NERISSA
Your father was ever virtuous, and holy men at their death have good

inspirations. Therefore the lottery that he hath devised in these three chests
of gold, silver, and lead, whereof who chooses his [30] meaning chooses you,