These are plain cases of virtue tried and purified in the straits of self-humiliation, virtue strained, as it were, through a close-knit fabric of difficulties and hardships, and triumphing over the wrongs that threaten its total defacement, and even turning its obstructions into a substance glorious as its own; that is, they are exceptional instances of a conscious departure from the letter and form of moral beauty for the fuller and clearer manifestation of its spirit and soul.

Nor are the virtues of Shakespeare’s men and women the mere result of a certain felicity and harmony of nature, or the spontaneous movements of a happy instinct so strong in them that they do what is right without knowing or meaning it.  No; his Henry the Fifth, and Horatio, and Kent, and Edgar, and Posthumus, his Helena, and Isabella, and Cordelia, and Hermione, and Imogen, and Catharine, are most truly “beings breathing thoughtful breath.”  Virtue is with them a discipline as well as a joy; a strong upright will is the backbone of it, and a healthy conscience is its keeper.  They all have conscious reasons for what they do, and can state them with piercing eloquence, if occasion bids.  For so the Poet, much as he delights in that fineness of nature or that innate grace which goes right of its own accord, evidently prefers, even in women, the goodness that has passed through struggles and temptations, and has its chief seat, not in impulse, but in principle, a virtue tested, and not merely instinctive:  rather say, he delights most in the virtue that proceeds by a happy consent and marriage of the two.  He therefore does not place his highest characters, whether men or women, in an atmosphere so pure that average mortals cannot breathe in it:  he depicts their moral nature in conflict, with the powers of good and evil striving in them for the mastery; and when the former prevail, it is because they have “a strong siding champion, Conscience,” to support them.  Thus through their weakness they come near enough to get hold of us, while at the same time in their strength they are enough higher than we to lift us upwards.

But Shakespeare’s main peculiarity as a teacher of goodness lies in this, that he keeps our moral sympathies in the right place without discovering his own.  With the one exception of Henry the Fifth, we cannot perceive, from the delineation itself, whether he takes part with the good character or the bad; nevertheless he somehow so puts the matter that we cannot help taking part with the good.  For I run no risk in saying there is not a single instance in his plays where the feelings of any natural-hearted reader fail to go along with those who are, at least relatively, the best.  And as he does not make nor even let us see which side he is on, so of course we are led to take the right side, not because he does, but simply because it is the right side.  Thus his moral lessons and inspirations affect us as coming, not from him, but from Nature herself; and