ature, really is; and as sympathy alone can discover that which really
is in matters of feeling and thought, true justice is in its essence a
finer knowledge through love.

'Tis very pregnant:
The jewel that we find we stoop and take it,
Because we see it; but what we do not see
We tread upon, and never think of it.

It is for this finer justice, a justice based on a more delicate
appreciation of the true conditions of men and things, a true respect
of persons in our estimate of actions, that the people in Measure for
Measure cry out as they pass before us; and as the poetry of this play
is full of the peculiarities of Shakespeare's poetry, so in its ethics
it is an epitome of Shakespeare's moral judgments. They are the moral
judgments of [184] an observer, of one who sits as a spectator, and
knows how the threads in the design before him hold together under the
surface: they are the judgments of the humourist also, who follows with
a half-amused but always pitiful sympathy, the various ways of human
disposition, and sees less distance than ordinary men between what are
called respectively great and little things. It is not always that
poetry can be the exponent of morality; but it is this aspect of morals
which it represents most naturally, for this true justice is dependent
on just those finer appreciations which poetry cultivates in us the
power of making, those peculiar valuations of action and its effect
which poetry actually requires.

1874.

NOTES

176. *Fletcher, in the Bloody Brother, gives the rest of it. Return.

SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLISH KINGS

[185]

A brittle glory shineth in this face:
As brittle as the glory is the face.

THE English plays of Shakespeare needed but the completion of one
unimportant interval to possess the unity of a popular chronicle from
Richard the Second to Henry the Eighth, and possess, as they actually
stand, the unity of a common motive in the handling of the various
events and persons which they bring before us. Certain of his historic
dramas, not English, display Shakespeare's mastery in the development
of the heroic nature amid heroic circumstances; and had he chosen, from
English history, to deal with Coeur-de-Lion or Edward the First, the
innate quality of his subject would doubtless have called into play
something of that profound and sombre power which in Julius Caesar and
Macbeth has sounded the depths of mighty character. True, on the whole,
t