mper,
loyal and light and swift alike of speech and swordstroke; and this is
all. But the character of the Bastard, clear and simple as broad
sunlight though it be, has in it other features than this single and
beautiful likeness of frank young manhood; his love of country and
loathing of the Church that would bring it into subjection are two sides
of the same national quality that has made and will always make every
Englishman of his type such another as he was in belief and in unbelief,
patriot and priest-hater; and no part of the design bears such witness to
the full-grown perfection of his creator's power and skill as the touch
that combines and fuses into absolute unity of concord the high and
various elements of faith in England, loyalty to the wretched lord who
has made him knight and acknowledged him kinsman, contempt for his
abjection at the foul feet of the Church, abhorrence of his crime and
constancy to his cause for something better worth the proof of war than
his miserable sake who hardly can be roused, even by such exhortation as
might put life and spirit into the dust of dead men's bones, to bid his
betters stand and strike in defence of the country dishonoured by his
reign.

It is this new element of variety in unity, this study of the complex and
diverse shades in a single nature, which requires from any criticism
worth attention some inquisition of character as complement to the
investigation of style. Analysis of any sort would be inapplicable to
the actors who bear their parts in the comic, the tragic or historic
plays of the first period. There is nothing in them to analyse; they
are, as we have seen, like all the characters represented by Marlowe, the
embodiments or the exponents of single qualities and simple forces. The
question of style also is therefore so far a simple question; but with
the change and advance in thought and all matter of spiritual study and
speculation this question also becomes complex, and inseparable, if we
would pursue it to any good end, from the analysis of character and
subject. In the debate on which we are now to enter, the question of
style and the question of character, or as we might say the questions of
matter and of spirit, are more than ever indivisible from each other,
more inextricably inwoven than elsewhere into the one most difficult
question of authorship which has ever been disputed in the dense and
noisy school or fought out in the wide and windy fi