s
upon the world, and with at least as much success; and choose to
manage so as to make their own minds easy with their faults, which can
scarce be done without management, rather than to mend them." Even so
Angelo for self-ends imitates sanctity, and then gets taken in by his
own imitation. This "mystery of iniquity" locks him from all true
knowledge of himself. He must be worse before he will be better. The
refined hypocrisies which so elude his eye, and thus nurse his
self-righteous pride, must put on a grosser form, till he cannot
choose but see himself as he is. The secret devil within must blaze
out in a shape too palpable to be ignored. And so, as often happens
where the subtleties of self-deceit are thus cherished, he at length
proceeds a downright conscious hypocrite, this too of the deepest dye.

Angelo's original fault lay in forgetting or ignoring his own frailty.
As a natural consequence, his "darling sin is pride that apes
humility." And his conceit of virtue,--"my gravity, wherein (let no
man hear me) I take pride,"--while it keeps him from certain vices, is
itself a far greater vice than any it keeps him from; insomuch that
his interviews with Isabella may almost be said to _elevate_ him into
lust. They at least bring him to a just vision of his inward self. The
serpent charms of self-deceit which he has so hugged are now broken.
For even so--and how awful is the fact!--men often wound themselves so
deeply with medicines, that Providence has no way for them,
apparently, but to make wounds medicinal, or, as Hooker says, "to cure
by vice where virtue hath stricken." So indeed it must be where men
turn their virtues into food of spiritual pride; which is the hardest
of all sores to be cured, "inasmuch as that which rooteth out other
vices causeth this." And perhaps the array of low and loathsome vices,
which the Poet has clustered about Angelo in the persons of Lucio,
Pompey, and Mrs. Overdone, was necessary, to make us feel how
unspeakably worse than any or all of these is Angelo's pride of
virtue. It can hardly be needful to add, that in Angelo these fearful
traits of character are depicted with a truth and sternness of pencil,
such as could scarce have been achieved but in an age fruitful in
living examples of them.

* * * * *

The placing of Isabella, "a thing ensky'd and sainted," and who truly
_is_ all that Angelo seems, side by side with such a breathing,
shining ma