phant, prosperous, happy.--Such is the moral spirit of
these great delineations.

I could easily go through all the Poet's instances of virtue and
innocence in conflict or in contrast with villainy and guilt, and show
that he never fails thus to keep our moral sympathies in the right
place without discovering his own; that he is just as far from
overdoing or overstressing the villainy of the bad as the virtue of
the good; both of which fall alike under the censure of moral
demonstrativeness, while, as in the two cases specified, his moral
teachings, even because they thus come from Nature, not from him,
therefore bring in their right hand sanctions which we cannot appeal
from if we would, and would not if we could.

There is one more point on which it may be needful to say a few
words.--Johnson and others have complained that Shakespeare seems to
write without any moral purpose; and that he does not make a just
distribution of good and evil. Both charges are strictly true; at
least, so I hope, and so I believe. As regards his seeming to write
without any moral purpose, on the same principle he seems to write
without any art. But who does not know that the very triumph of art
lies in concealing art; that is, in seeming to write without it? And
so, if the Poet writes without discovering any moral purpose, that
very fact is just the highest triumph of art in the moral direction.
For no one has alleged that he seems to write with an immoral purpose.
Here, then, I have but to say that, with so consummate an artist as
Shakespeare, if the charge is not true, it ought to be. Redundancy of
conscience is indeed fatal to art; but then it is also, if not fatal,
at least highly damaging to morality; "for goodness, growing to a
plurisy, dies in its own too much." Verily, a moral teacher's first
business is to clear his mind of cant. And so much the wise and good
Dr. Johnson himself will tell us.

If, again, Shakespeare fails to make a just distribution of good and
evil, so also does Providence. If, in his representations, virtue is
not always crowned with visible success, nor crime with apparent
defeat; if the good are often cast down, the evil often lifted up, and
sometimes both cast down together; the workings of Providence in the
actual treatment of men are equally at fault in that matter. Or if he
makes the sun of his genius to rise on the evil and on the good, and
sends the rain of his genius on the just and on the unjust, wh