nothing is real in it but the dread
of losing a reputation. Hence the frightful contrast between their women
(even those who are meant for virtuous) and Shakespeare's. So, for
instance, _The Maid in the Mill_:--a woman must not merely have grown old
in brothels, but have chuckled over every abomination committed in them
with a rampant sympathy of imagination, to have had her fancy so drunk
with the _minutiae_ of lechery as this icy chaste virgin evinces hers to
have been.

It would be worth while to note how many of these plays are founded on
rapes,--how many on incestuous passions, and how many on mere lunacies.
Then their virtuous women are either crazy superstitions of a mere bodily
negation of having been acted on, or strumpets in their imaginations and
wishes, or, as in this _Maid in the Mill_, both at the same time. In the
men, the love is merely lust in one direction,--exclusive preference of one
object. The tyrant's speeches are mostly taken from the mouths of
indignant denouncers of the tyrant's character, with the substitution of
"I" for "he,"" and the omission of the prefatory "he acts as if he
thought" so and so. The only feelings they can possibly excite are disgust
at the AEciuses, if regarded as sane loyalists, or compassion if considered
as Bedlamites. So much for their tragedies. But even their comedies are,
most of them, disturbed by the fantasticalness, or gross caricature, of
the persons or incidents. There are few characters that you can really
like (even though you should have erased from your mind all the filth
which bespatters the most likeable of them, as Piniero in _The Island
Princess_ for instance),--scarcely one whom you can love. How different
this from Shakespeare, who makes one have a sort of sneaking affection
even for his Barnardines;--whose very Iagos and Richards are awful, and, by
the counteracting power of profound intellects, rendered fearful rather
than hateful;--and even the exceptions, as Goneril and Regan, are proofs of
superlative judgment and the finest moral tact, in being left utter
monsters, _nulla virtute redemptae_, and in being kept out of sight as much
as possible,--they being, indeed, only means for the excitement and
deepening of noblest emotions towards the Lear, Cordelia, &c. and employed
with the severest economy! But even Shakespeare's grossness--that which is
really so, independently of the increase in modern times of vicious
associations with things indifferent