e pretty sure, in effect, to carry the day.

Now Milton's Satan, I think, may be not unfitly described as a highly
magnified realistic freethinker. Iago and Edmund are also realistic
freethinkers, the former slightly magnified, the latter unmagnified,
though both may be somewhat idealized. And both of them speak and act
strictly in that character. Accordingly all religion is in their
account mere superstition; and they take pride in never acknowledging
their Maker but to brave Him. Both exult above all things in their
intellectuality; and what they have the intellect to do, that is with
them the only limit to intellectual action; that is, their own will is
to them the highest law: hence to ruin another by outwitting and
circumventing him is their characteristic pastime; and if they can do
this through his virtues, all the better. Iago's moral creed may be
summed up in two of his aphoristic sayings,--"Virtue! a fig! 'tis in
ourselves that we are thus or thus"; and, "Put money in thy purse";
while Edmund wants no other reason for his exploiting than that his
brother is one

"Whose nature is so far from doing harms,
That he suspects none; on whose foolish honesty
My practices ride easy."

The characters of the two freethinking heroes are delineated
consistently throughout, in keeping with these ideas, no one can say,
no one has ever said, that the Poet discovers any the least prejudice
against them, or any leanings of moral or personal sympathy towards
their victims. Nothing comes from him that can be fairly construed as
a hint to us against warming up to them. Nor has any one a right to
say that he overdoes or overstresses their wickedness a jot: he merely
shows it, or rather lets them show it, just as it is. He lends them
the whole benefit of his genius for the best possible airing of their
intellectual gifts and graces; all this too without swerving a hair
from the line of cold, calm, even-handed justice: yet how do our
feelings, how do our moral sympathies, run in these cases? I need not
say they run wholly and unreservedly with the chivalrous but infirm
Cassio, the honest and honour-loving Othello, the innocent though not
faultless Desdemona; with the pious and unsuspecting Edgar, the erring
indeed but still upright and sound-hearted Gloster. Nay, more; we
would rather be in the place of the victims than of the victors:
virtue wronged, betrayed, crushed, seems to us a more eligible lot
than crime trium