much a
prototype or an autotype of the huge national vice of England. This
comment is in itself as surely just and true as it is incisive and
direct: but it will not cover by any manner of means the whole question.
The strong and radical objection distinctly brought forward against this
play, and strenuously supported by the wisest and the warmest devotee
among all the worshippers of Shakespeare, is not exactly this, that the
Puritan Angelo is exposed: it is that the Puritan Angelo is unpunished.
In the very words of Coleridge, it is that by his pardon and his marriage
"the strong indignant claim of justice" is "baffled." The expression is
absolutely correct and apt: justice is not merely evaded or ignored or
even defied: she is both in the older and the newer sense of the word
directly and deliberately baffled; buffeted, outraged, insulted, struck
in the face. We are left hungry and thirsty after having been made to
thirst and hunger for some wholesome single grain at least of righteous
and too long retarded retribution: we are tricked out of our dole,
defeated of our due, lured and led on to look for some equitable and
satisfying upshot, defrauded and derided and sent empty away.

That this play is in its very inmost essence a tragedy, and that no
sleight of hand or force of hand could give it even a tolerable show of
coherence or consistency when clipped and docked of its proper and
rightful end, the mere tone of style prevalent throughout all its better
parts to the absolute exclusion of any other would of itself most amply
suffice to show. Almost all that is here worthy of Shakespeare at any
time is worthy of Shakespeare at his highest: and of this every touch,
every line, every incident, every syllable, belongs to pure and simple
tragedy. The evasion of a tragic end by the invention and intromission
of Mariana has deserved and received high praise for its ingenuity but
ingenious evasion of a natural and proper end is usually the distinctive
quality which denotes a workman of a very much lower school than the
school of Shakespeare. In short and in fact, the whole elaborate
machinery by which the complete and completely unsatisfactory result of
the whole plot is attained is so thoroughly worthy of such a contriver as
"the old fantastical duke of dark corners" as to be in a moral sense, if
I dare say what I think, very far from thoroughly worthy of the wisest
and mightiest mind that ever was informed with the s