sters and his people, he invests with supreme authority the zealous, and, to all appearance, sternly virtuous Angelo, associating with him in an inferior rank the mild old Escalus. At first, as all expected, Angelo exercises his deputed power with rigour, and seeming conscientiousness. He revives an old law which punishes all crimes of incontinency with death, and under it throws into prison Claudio, a light-minded but far from vicious young nobleman, who had seduced his mistress before marriage. The attempted deliverance and final rescue of the youth by the exertions of his sister, and with the aid of the Duke, forms the groundwork of the intrigue. The very Angelo who makes such loud profession of strict moral integrity, who insists on the necessity of order and a rigorous execution of the law, and inexorably punishes sin and weakness in others, who boasts of his own virtue and has indeed a real desire to be what he seems, falls from his arrogated superiority, and with far greater criminality into the same fault which, in spite of his pledge and promise to the contrary, he is even resolved to visit with its extreme penalty. Having once yielded to human weakness, he quickly becomes a worthless hypocrite and deceiver. For so it invariably happens; the pride of virtue and moral arrogance, which thinks itself proof against all temptation, such inflated self-righteousness, sinks the more easily for its lofty pretensions into the lowest abyss of guilt. That the hypocrite should be finally unmasked by the counteracting intrigue of the Duke, aided and favoured by Chance,-Claudio rescued, and his truly virtuous and amiable sister rewarded for her magnanimity,the fantastic and talkative Lucio put to open shame, and the pimping Clown, with a harsh rebuke,—is in perfect keeping with the spirit of the whole, in so far as it cannot possess a poetic justification except within the limits of the comic domain.

The preceding hasty sketch is sufficient to reveal the organic centre of the whole composition. Human virtue and morality, in so far as they pretend to be something in and by themselves, and claim to be self-sufficient, is the mark against which Comedy directs its mockery, and which the dialectic of irony, or rather their own immanent dialectic, soon resolves into absolute nothingness. Virtue and morality are, no doubt (who will pretend to deny it?) the principle and the end of human existence. But they are so merely

through and in God. Mere human virtue, which pretends to a strength of its own, and, as if it had with free creative energy made itself, arrogates a self-sufficiency, is but a mere factitious virtue, a nothing, like the glittering soap-bubble which bursts with the first breath of air; nay, it is infinitely lower than nothing, since it is the vilest of sins, and the seed and germ of all wickedness. The whole piece, accordingly, rests on the prime christian truth-we are all sinners, children of wrath, and in need of mercy; in other words, life is here contemplated in its gravest and profoundest principle of virtue and morality. But even this foundation is found to be frail, hollow, and worm-eaten, when employed exclusively in its earthly and human nature to prop up and support the human and the earthly.

It is not man's moral energy, but the divine grace, which is the stay of human life, because it is only in and through the latter, that human virtue becomes practicable, and that it is truly and properly virtue;-a truth similar to that which the "Merchant of Venice" illustrated in the case of law. If it be true that it is only by God's grace, and upon penitent acknowledgment of his own frailty and sinfulness, that man receives the faculty of virtue and perfection, then most assuredly is he bound to shew mercy and not justice; and, for punishment, pardon upon his repentant and sorrowing fellows; as Shakspeare beautifully expresses it:—

"Alas! alas!

Why, all the souls that were, were forfeit once;
And he that might the vantage best have took,
Found out the remedy. How would you be,
If he, which is the top of judgment, should
But judge you as you are? O, think on that,
And mercy then will breathe within your lips,
Like man new made!"

And again in these sublime words :

"Could great men thunder

As Jove himself does, Jove would ne'er be quiet,

For every pelting, petty officer,

Would use his heaven for thunder;

Nothing but thunder. Merciful heaven!

Thou rather with thy sharp and sulphurous bolt

Split'st the unwedgeable and gnarled oak,
Than the soft myrtle; but man, proud man!
Drest in a little brief authority,

Most ignorant of what he's most assured,
His glassy essence, like an angry ape,

Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven,

As make the angels weep; who, with our spleens,
Would all themselves laugh mortal."

When the poem itself furnishes such abundant explanations of its deep and pregnant meaning, it would be worse than folly to presume to add one word on the subject. All that remains for me to do is, to point out the manner the fundamental idea is again reflected in the several parts-the characters, the situations, and the circumstances, attracting them all to its magnetic centre, and there arranging them into one organic body. I have already pointed out this in the principal moments of the action; in the conduct of Angelo (the utter worthlessness of which requires to be exposed, for which purpose the cheat which is played upon him by Mariana and Isabella, with the Duke's assistance, is indispensable,) in the danger and deliverance of Claudio, and in the part which the Duke and Isabella, as the representatives of true virtue, take in the plot, and in bringing about the result. The Duke, Angelo, and Isabella, are the principal characters; in the piece itself these are pretty fully developed, and therefore, after our previous remarks, do not require any further examination. Escalus stands by the side of Angelo like the mild, peaceful, and aged sage, by impetuous and energetic manhood: his long years have taught and purified him, and he no longer mistakes proud pretension for virtue, nor rigour for justice. His part is indispensable as an organic counterpoise to Angelo; and partly as a mean between him and the Duke. For the Duke and Isabella stand far higher than he does; they have the grace of God with them, while he possesses nothing more than human experience and compassion. With equal wisdom, Claudio and Juliet appear only in the background; they are the well-executed pictures of human weakness which sins from too great liberty, and being brought by constraint and suffering to repentance, on its penitent return is received and forgiven. They stand in contrast to the Pharisaic virtue of Angelo,

and are, as it were, the opposite pole of the piece. In Lucio, lastly, and Froth, Pompey the Clown, Barnardine, and Mistress Overdone, we have various shades of human folly, vice, and iniquity. Lucio, without being absolutely depraved or intentionally bad, as we see from his ready co-operation with Claudio and Isabella, becomes, through want of consideration, both vicious and dissolute. Young Master Froth is simply froth; without solidity enough for deep crime, and far too light for virtue. Mistress Overdone loves sin from long habit, and because she gains a livelihood by it. The murderer Barnardine is the type of man's rude sensual nature, which becomes inhuman because civilization has not extended to it the training hand of education;-we see in his crime the sinfulness of the individual, which has its root and nurture within itself, but is at the same time fed and fostered by the universal sinfulness of the human race. Lastly, Pompey is the assistant of vice from mere stupidity; he knows not, nor indeed troubles himself to think what it is he is doing, and his untaught ignorance looks upon life itself as a drinking-room, in which a man may be merry if he will, but not without money: his faults are not so much faults of inclination and commission, as they are the fruit of a criminal want of a right knowledge and of a perverted judgment; he has a conviction that no man is or can be without faults and weaknesses, and so he allows himself to go his own. way without thought or care; his crime is his very folly, and therefore it is of the most venial kind. Although he sustains the part of the Clown of the piece, the preceding remarks must have prepared us to find that it is not pre-eminently his vocation to invest in his own individuality the fundamental idea with concrete vitality, or to exhibit it in a parodical form. Ordinary folly is too light to balance the whole weight of the grave view of life, which is here opened before us; and a more reflective and tragic fool, like the friend of "Lear," would be out of place in comedy. Accordingly, Shakspeare has made use of the fool, as one among many other subordinate characters, to throw light upon the leading idea; he has no more weight and importance than any of the other figures with whom we have classed him. But if we ask

what common purpose is this-for what end is

this register of

crime and criminals brought before us-the answer is at hand :

as we must gain a real insight into the essence of human virtue and morality, it is to this end necessary to look into the whole depths of man's viciousness and immorality; that is the purpose of the poem. All these sinful creatures, with their various offences, were furthermore requisite to shew how far more deserving of mercy and forgiveness all other evil-doers are, than the harsh, arrogantly virtuous, and hypocritical Angelo. Let us listen to the Duke's instructive words addressed to Barnardine:

"There was a friar told me of this man.

Sirrah, thou art said to have a stubborn soul,
That apprehends no farther than this world,

And squar'st thy life according. Thou'rt condemned.
But, for those earthly faults, I quit them all,
And pray thee, take this mercy to provide

For better times to come.-Friar, advise him:
I leave him to your hand :"

and it will be impossible to doubt that the poet especially introduced these figures for this excellent reason, of reflecting in their evil vices the still more evil virtue of Angelo. They were therefore necessary in order that the profound depth of the represented idea might be totally exhausted. For the comic view of thingsand comedy, which is its dramatico-poetic form-work only by contrast. It is not true human virtue and morality that it directly exhibits, but rather false virtue, sin, and moral perversity. And even because the latter is broken in pieces before the might of virtue, or else proves its own destruction, truth and justice are by the contrast brought to view, not merely before the mental eye of the spectator, but bodily in the drama itself. And it is simply on this account, and not because of the occasional comic scenes and laughable characters, that "Measure for Measure" merits its title of comedy it is, in truth, a perfect comedy in Shakspeare's noble style.

I cannot, therefore, understand on what principle this piece has been censured as gloomy. This blame could only have proceeded from a mind which had never felt the inexpressible pleasure of melancholy. As to its fundamental idea, that is the most cheerful that could be. An inexhaustible stream of joy wells forth from the thought that, although mere human virtue is absolutely good