g,
Be it good or bad, that he shall undertake;
An unreputed mote, flying in the sun,
Presents a greater substance than it is;
The freshest summer's day doth soonest taint
The loathed carrion that it seems to kiss;
Deep are the blows made with a mighty axe;
That sin doth ten times aggravate itself
That is committed in a holy place;
An evil deed, done by authority,
Is sin, and subornation: Deck an ape
In tissue, and the beauty of the robe
Adds but the greater scorn unto the beast.

(Here are four passably good lines, which vaguely remind the reader of
something better read elsewhere; a common case enough with the more
tolerable work of small imitative poets.)

A spacious field of reasons could I urge
Between his glory, daughter, and thy shame:
That poison shows worst in a golden cup;
Dark night seems darker by the lightning flash;
_Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds_;
And every glory that inclines to sin,
The shame is treble by the opposite.
So leave I, with my blessing in thy bosom;
Which then convert to a most heavy curse,
When thou convert'st from honour's golden name
To the black faction of bed-blotting shame! [_Exit_.

_Countess_. I'll follow thee:--And when my mind turns so,
My body sink my soul in endless woe! [_Exit_.

So much for the central and crowning scene, the test, the climax, the
hinge on which the first part of this play turns; and seems to me, in
turning, to emit but a feeble and rusty squeak. No probable reader will
need to be reminded that the line which I have perhaps unnecessarily
italicised appears also as the last verse in the ninety-fourth of those
"sugared sonnets" which we know were in circulation about the time of
this play's first appearance among Shakespeare's "private friends"; in
other words, which enjoyed such a kind of public privacy or private
publicity as one or two among the most eminent English poets of our own
day have occasionally chosen for some part of their work, to screen it
for awhile as under the shelter and the shade of crepuscular laurels,
till ripe for the sunshine or the storm of public judgment. In the
present case, this debatable verse looks to me more like a loan or maybe
a theft from Shakespeare's private store of undramatic poetry than a
misapplication by its own author to dramatic purposes of a line too apt
and exquisite to endure without injury the trans