y should
this be thought wrong in him, when Providence manifestly does the
same?

For, explain the fact as we may, it is certain that the consummations
of justice are not always experienced here. The world is full of
beginnings that are to be finished elsewhere, if finished at all.
Virtue often meets with very rough usage in the present order of
things: poverty and want, hardship, suffering, and reproach, are often
the lot of the good; while men of the opposite character have their
portion carved to them out of the best that the world has to bestow.
Nay, it sometimes happens that the truest, the kindest, and most
upright souls are the most exposed to injuries and wrongs; their
virtues being to them a kind of "sanctified and holy traitors," and
the heaven within them serving to disable them from winning the prizes
of earth: whereas the very unscrupulousness of the bad, their hardness
of heart and unbashfulness of front build or open for them the palaces
of wealth and splendour and greatness; their want of principle seems
to strengthen their hands; they rise the higher, that they care not
whose ruins they rise upon, and command the larger success for being
reckless how they succeed.

And is a poet, who professedly aims at nothing better than a just
reflection of human life and character as he finds them, is he to be
blamed for faithfully holding the mirror up to facts as they are in
this respect? That our Shakespeare, the mighty and the lovely,
sometimes permits the good to suffer while their wrongers prosper, I
thence infer, not indeed that he regarded them indifferently, but that
he had a right Christian faith in a further stage of being where the
present disorder of things in this point is to be rectified, and the
moral discriminations of Providence consummated. His judgment clearly
was, that suffering and death are not the worst things that can happen
to a man here. He reverences virtue, he does not patronize it. And the
virtue he has in reverence is not a hanger-on at the counters of
worldly thrift. He knew right well that "the fineness of such metal is
not found in Fortune's love," but rather "in the wind and tempest of
her frown"; and so he paints it as a thing "that Fortune's buffets and
rewards doth take with equal thanks." And, surely, what we need here
is a deeper faith, a firmer trust in the government of a Being "in
whose pure sight all virtue doth succeed"; yea, and perhaps succeeds
most highly in those v