proper limit to extend it to points such as these; I shall not therefore attempt to illustrate them in detail; only, as a warning upon the choice of friends, I venture to quote the dying speech of the Duke of Buckingham, in King Henry VIII. :—

You that hear me,

This from a dying man receive as certain :
Where you are liberal of your loves and counsels,
Be sure you be not loose, for those you make friends,
And give your hearts to, when they once perceive
The least rub in your fortunes, fall away

Like water from ye, never found again,
But where they mean to sink ye.

Act ii. Sc. 1.

Falstaff gives us another and still weightier reason for the same precept:

It is certain that either wise bearing or ignorant carriage is caught, as men take diseases, one of another: therefore let men take heed of their company.

Compare with this sentiment the verse of Menander quoted by S. Paul in 1 Cor. iii. 18.

And that a multitude is not to be followed in doing evil, where could we find a more just, though laughable illustration, than in the words of Fluellen in the English camp before the battle of Agincourt?—

If the enemy is an ass and a fool and a prating coxcomb, is it meet, think you, that we should also, look you, be an ass and a fool and a prating coxcomb :—in your own conscience now? K. Henry V. Act iv. Sc. 1.

* See Psalm lviii. 6, Prayer-Book version.

SECT. 10. Of Diligence, Sobriety, and Chastity.

I have already been led to speak, in the eighth section of this chapter, on the close connection and sacredness of the Conjugal Relationship. It is a relationship whereby the wife becomes, in the highest and noblest sense, the property of the husband, and the husband the property of the wife. A British Churchman may be allowed to please himself in fancying Shakspeare as an occasional hearer of Bp. Andrewes *-the greatest poet listening to the greatest preacher of the age-and had he been present when that admirable divine delivered his Exposition of the Seventh Commandment,' he could not have laid down its first principles more accurately than he has done in Troilus and Cressida, where Hector thus speaks respecting the duty of restoring Helen to her husband Menelaus :

Nature craves

All dues be rendered to their owners; now,

What nearer debt † in all humanity

Than wife is to the husband? If this law

Of nature be corrupted thro' affection,

There is a law in each well-order'd nation,
To curb those raging appetites that are

* Born in 1555; one of the translators of the Bible, 1611.

† Mr. Malone interprets the word 'propriety' as used by Olivia in Twelfth Night, Act v. Sc. 2, in this sense, viz. to mean the right of property which a married couple have in each other, and which Milton speaks of as the sole propriety in Paradise; ' but I rather think it means in that place, 'proper state.'

Most disobedient and refractory.
If Helen then be wife to Sparta's king-
As it is known she is-these moral laws
Of nature and of nations speak aloud

To have her back returned :-Thus to persist
In doing wrong, extenuates not wrong,
But makes it much more heavy.

Act ii. Sc. 2.

And in Measure for Measure our poet follows the severity of the Mosaic Law, that those who commit the sins more immediately forbidden by this commandment are worthy of death,* no less than they who commit murder :

It were as good

To pardon him, that hath from nature stolen

A man already made, as to remit +

Their saucy sweetness, that do coin Heaven's image
In stamps that are forbid ;-

Act ii. Sc. 4.

an aphorism not the less profound because enunciated by a hypocrite, of which the author gives us intimation, with admirable skill, by the phrase chosen to describe the sin which is at once palliated and proscribed. In like manner, no exception can be taken against the truth of what follows-in regard either to the imprudence of hasty marriage or the criminality of divorce-however we may abhor the speaker, the wicked Gloster :

Hasty marriage seldom proveth well.

Yet God forbid that I should wish them severed,
Whom God hath joined together.

K. Henry VI. 3rd Part, Act iv. Sc. 1.

* See also King Lear, Act iv. Sc. 6. But comp. S. John viii. 11. Inordinate indulgence of sensual appetite.

+ Pardon.

There is a sentiment, too often realised in the experience of inordinate affection and unhallowed intercourse between the sexes, which our poet might have adopted from the miserable history of Amnon and Tamar, recorded in 2 Samuel xiii. 2-15:— Sweet love, I see, changing his property,

Turns to the sourest and most deadly hate.

K. Richard II. Act iii. Sc. 2.

And where shall we find the unhappy passion which sometimes seizes upon true and pure affection, and which Shakspeare has delineated with overwhelming power in Othello,* and again in Winter's Tale and Comedy of Errors, more justly characterised, though in so few words, than in the Song of Solomon ?

Jealousy is cruel as the grave; the coals thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehement flame.

viii. 6.

That the plays of Shakspeare are not free from passages which may minister food to an impure imagination,† cannot be denied; but that their

* In mitigation of the horror which the conduct of Othello inspires, it would be well if it could be proved that he was not a Christian. Schlegel regards him so, and points this out as an instance in which Shakspeare has improved upon the novel, the Moor of which he says ' is a baptised Saracen.' But to say nothing of the language which Othello himself uses in Act ii. Sc. 3, quoted in the next page; or of the reference which Iago (who surely must be considered of the same religion as his general) makes to proofs of Holy Writ' in Act iii. Sc. 3; it is plain that Schlegel must have overlooked the passage in Iago's soliloquy (Act ii. Sc. 3) where he speaks of Othello as ready even' to renounce his baptism' for the love of Desdemona.

† He writes as if penitently conscious of this in his Sonnets cx. and cxi, But compare my remarks below in the Conclusion.

*

general tendency is of an opposite and wholly virtuous character, is no less certain. Nor has he omitted, on fit occasions, to give us the best of lessons for the control of passion, and the avoiding of excess: as, for instance, in Measure for Measure, the severe rebuke which the Duke, disguised as a friar, administers to the Clown upon his profligate course of life, Act iii. Sc. 2; and in Othello, where Cassio, after he had been betrayed into intoxication, delivers the following lecture against intempe

rance :

Oh! that men should put an enemy to their mouths to steal away their brains! that we should with joy, revel, pleasure and applause, transform ourselves into beasts!

Iago. Why, but you are now well enough. thus recovered?

How came you

Cassio. It hath pleased the devil Drunkenness to give place to the devil† wrath : one imperfectness shows me another, to make me frankly despise myself. To be now a sensible man,

O strange!

by and by a fool, and presently ‡ a beast!
inordinate cup is unblessed, and the ingredient is a devil.

Every

Act ii. Sc. 3.

The drinking bout had ended in a quarrel, and in the midst of the disturbance, Othello, coming in, exclaims :

* See the earnest caution to lovers before marriage in Tempest, Act iv. Sc. 1, and the Song of the Fairies in Merry Wives of Windsor, Act v. Sc. 5.

† See Ephes. iv. 27.

Compare what the clown, in Twelfth Night, says of a drunken man that he is like a drowned man, a fool, and a madman.' Act i. Sc. 5.