"Jessica, my child." Though he curses her in the greatest passion of wrath, and would fain see her dead at his feet, with the jewels in her ears and with the ducats in her coffin, he still loves her more than all ducats and jewels. Excluded from public life and Christian society, and forced into the narrow consolation of domestic happi- ness, there remain to the poor Jew only family feelings, and these come forth from him with the most touching tenderness. The turquoise, the ring which his wife Leah once gave him, he would not exchange for " a wilderness of monkeys." When in the judgment scene Bassanio speaks thus to Antonio :
- Antonio, I am married to a wife
Which is as clear to me as life itself ; But life itself, my wife, and all the world, Are not with me esteem'd above thy life : I would lose all, ay, sacrifice them all Here to this devil, to deliver you." To which Gratiano adds : " I have a wife, whom, I protest, I love : I would she were in heaven, so she could Entreat some power to change this currish Jew." l Then there awakes in Shy lock a dreadful appre- hension as to the fate of his daughter, married 1 Merchant of Venice, act iv. sc. I.
