se least by extraction and separation from their
context. That some cynic had lately bitten him by the brain--and
possibly a cynic himself in a nearly rabid stage of anthropophobia--we
might conclude as reasonably from consideration of the whole as from
examination of the parts more especially and virulently affected: yet how
much is here also of hyper-Platonic subtlety and sublimity, of golden and
Hyblaean eloquence above the reach and beyond the snap of any cynic's
tooth! Shakespeare, as under the guidance at once for good and for evil
of his alternately Socratic and Swiftian familiar, has set himself as if
prepensely and on purpose to brutalise the type of Achilles and
spiritualise the type of Ulysses. The former is an enterprise never to
be utterly forgiven by any one who ever loved from the very birth of his
boyhood the very name of the son of the sea-goddess in the glorious words
of Mr. Browning's young first-born poem,

Who stood beside the naked Swift-footed,
And bound [his] forehead with Proserpine's hair.

It is true, if that be any little compensation, that Hector and
Andromache fare here hardly better than he: while of the momentary
presentation of Helen on the dirtier boards of a stage more miry than the
tub of Diogenes I would not if I could and I must not though I would say
so much as one single proper word. The hysterics of the eponymous hero
and the harlotries of the eponymous heroine remove both alike beyond the
outer pale of all rational and manly sympathy; though Shakespeare's self
may never have exceeded or equalled for subtle and accurate and bitter
fidelity the study here given of an utterly light woman, shallow and
loose and dissolute in the most literal sense, rather than perverse or
unkindly or unclean; and though Keats alone in his most perfect mood of
lyric passion and burning vision as full of fragrance as of flame could
have matched and all but overmatched those passages in which the rapture
of Troilus makes pale and humble by comparison the keenest raptures of
Romeo.

The relative disfavour in which the play of _Measure for Measure_ has
doubtless been at all times generally held is not in my opinion simply
explicable on the theory which of late years has been so powerfully and
plausibly advanced and advocated on the highest poetic or judicial
authority in France or in the world, that in the land of many-coloured
cant and many-coated hypocrisy the type of Angelo is something too