and affecting imagery on two other occasions. The former in the Merchant of Venice, in the moonlight scene where Lorenzo says to Jessica :

Look how the floor of heaven

Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold;

There's not the smallest orb, which thou behold'st,

But in his motion like an angel sings,

Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubims. Act v. Sc. 1. The latter, in King Henry VIII., where the Duke of Norfolk, speaking of Cardinal Wolsey in reference to the good Queen Katharine, thus testifies to her duty and affection for her unworthy husband:He counsels a divorce-a loss of her,

That, like a jewel, has hung twenty years
About his neck, yet never lost her lustre ;
Of her that loves him with that excellence,
That angels love good men with; even of her,

*

That, when the greatest stroke of fortune falls,
Will bless the king.

Act ii. Sc. 2.

It is an opinion held by tradition in the Church, rather than directly derived from Scripture, that pride, or ambition, was the sin which led to the fall of Satan, and his associate angels. To this opinion our poet has referred in the well-known dying speech of Cardinal Wolsey to his servant Cromwell, afterwards the celebrated Earl of Essex :

Cromwell, I charge thee, fling away ambition;
By that sin fell the angels; how can man, then,
The image of his Maker, hope to win by 't?

Act iii. Sc. 2.

* Angels are represented as weeping' over the pride and follies

of men in Measure for Measure, Act ii. Sc. 2.

In a previous part of the same scene, Wolsey had soliloquised to the same effect, using the same comparison, with the addition of the fearful consideration that such a fall is without hope :

O! how wretched

Is that poor man, that hangs on princes' favours!
There is, betwixt that smile we would aspire to,
That sweet aspect of princes, and their* ruin,
More pangs
and fears than wars or woman have :
And when he falls, be falls like Lucifer,

Never to hope again.

The simile in this last passage is evidently formed upon Isaiah xiv. 12,

How art thou fallen from heaven,O Lucifer, Son of the morning; where the well-known Oriental figure† of speech, in which the overthrow of kingdoms is represented by the falling or eclipse of the Heavenly Bodies, is applied prophetically to the downfall of the King of Babylon. But there is no Scriptural authority for giving the name of Lucifer, or Morning Star, to Satan. The misapplication of the name, however, if it is to be considered such, did not originate with our poet. On the contrary, we find that in very early times the Prophet Isaiah was understood to speak in that place of the evil spirit; and long before Shakspeare the name Lucifer had been, in consequence, popularly so applied. Mr. Malone quotes

* i. e. Their displeasure, producing overthrow.

+ See Lowth on Isaiah xiii. 10.

e. g. By Tertullian.—See Advers. Marcion. Lib. v. pp. 475, 482.

very appositely from Churchyard's Legend of Cardinal Wolsey (published in Higgin's Mirrour for Magistrates, 1527)—

Your fault not half so great as was my pride;

For which offence fell Lucifer* from the skies.

In a scene which shows that our poet possessed a remarkable insight into the Scotch character, and designed to exhibit it, more especially in Malcolm, the son of the murdered king, we read :

Angels are bright still, tho' the brightest fell.

'

Macbeth, Act iv. Sc. 3.

And then became most deformed. So our poet speaks of the fiend' in King Lear, Act iv. Sc. 2; of 'the common enemy of man,' in Macbeth, Act iii. Sc. I, and in Twelfth Night, Act iii. Sc. 4. And he follows up the idea in King Henry V. :—

What is it then to me, if impious war,

Arrayed in flames, like to the prince of fiends,

Do, with his smirch'd complexion, all fell feats
Enlink'd to waste and desolation?

Act iii. Sc. 3.

Again, he is described, in the language of Scripture, as the Prince of Darkness,' in King Lear, Act iii. Sc. 3, and in All's well, &c., Act iv. Sc. 5; also, in

the latter place, as

by implication, as

the Prince of the World ;' and

the Father of Lies,' in King

Henry IV. 1st Part, where Hotspur says to Glendower :

And I can teach thee, coz, to shame the devil,
By telling truth.

Act iii. Sc. I.

* See also Christian Year, 3rd Sunday in Lent.

And as a slanderer,' or false accuser, in the Merry Wives of Windsor, Act v. Sc. 5.

The passage of St. Peter,

:

Be sober, be vigilant because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour; 1 Pet. v. 8.

was plainly in our poet's mind, in King Henry V., where the king says to the traitor Lord Scroop;

If that same dæmon, that hath gull'd thee thus,
Should with his lion gait walk the whole world,
He might return to vasty Tartar * back
And tell the legions,† I can never win
A soul so easy as that Englishman's.

Act ii. Sc. 2.

The power which we learn from S. Paul that Satan possesses of transforming himself into an angel of light,' 2 Cor. xi. 14, is ascribed to him in Hamlet.

The devil hath power

To assume a pleasing shape.

Act ii. Sc. 2.

And again, with the addition that such deceitful disguises are most used when the worst temptations are to be practised, in Othello :

When devils will their blackest sins put on,
They do suggest at first with heavenly shows.

Act ii. Sc. 3.

* i. e. Tartarus.

† See Mark v. 9. and comp. Twelfth Night, Act iii. Sc. 4. See also the doubtful passage in Act iii. Sc. 4, 'That monster custom,' &c.

SECT. 3. Of God's Goodness in Creation, and in the Redemption of Man.

How comprehensive is the view which our poet has taken of the goodness of creation in all its stages, from the composition of the simplest herb up to the crowning work of all-the soul of man! And how natural the transition from the rising of day out of night, of light out of darkness, to the reproduction of all things out of the earth, to which they fall and sink as into a grave! How just, also, and how Scriptural, the representation, that though all things were made 'very good' by their Creator, His creature, man, has the power of perverting them to evil, and will abuse that power, or will keep it in subjection, according as he follows the guiding of his own free but corrupted will, which brought death into the world, or obeys the dictates of conscience and of the spirit of grace! I allude to the scene in Romeo and Juliet, before Friar Laurence's cell, where the friar, entering with a basket, thus soliloquizes:

The grey-eyed morn smiles on the frowning night,
Checking the Eastern clouds with streaks of light;

*

And flecked darkness like a drunkard reels,

From forth day's path, and Titan's fiery wheels :

Was our poet indebted here to that bold figure of the the prophet Isaiah, The earth shall reel

* Spotted, streaked.