so the authority they carry is not his, good as that may be, but hers, which is infinitely better.  Thus he is ever appealing directly to the tribunal of our own inward moral forces, and at the same time speaking health and light into that tribunal.  There need be, there can be, no higher proof of the perfect moral sanity of his genius than this.  And for right moral effect it is just the best thing we can have, and is worth a thousand times more than all the ethical arguing and voting in the world.  If it be a marvel how the Poet can keep his own hand so utterly unmoved by the passion he is representing, it is surely not less admirable that he should thus, without showing any compassion himself, move our compassion in just the degree, and draw it to just the place, which the laws of moral beauty and proportion require.

Herein even Milton, great and good as he unquestionably is, falls far below Shakespeare as a moral poet.  Take the delineation of Satan in Paradise Lost.  Now Milton does not leave us at all in doubt as to where his own moral sympathies go in that delineation:  they are altogether on the side of God and the good Angels.  And he tells us again and again, or as good as tells us, that ours ought to be there; so that there is no possibility of mistake in the matter.  Notwithstanding I suspect he does not quite succeed in keeping the reader’s moral sympathies there.  He does indeed with me:  my own feelings have somehow been so steeped in the foolish old doctrine or faith which holds obedience to be a cardinal virtue, that they have never sided with Satan in that controversy.  But I believe a majority of readers do find their moral feelings rather drawing to the rebel side; this too, notwithstanding their moral judgment may speak the other way:  and when the feelings and the judgment are thus put at odds, the former are pretty sure, in effect, to carry the day.

Now Milton’s Satan, I think, may be not unfitly described as a highly magnified realistic freethinker.  Iago and Edmund are also realistic freethinkers, the former slightly magnified, the latter unmagnified, though both may be somewhat idealized.  And both of them speak and act strictly in that character.  Accordingly all religion is in their account mere superstition; and they take pride in never acknowledging their Maker but to brave Him.  Both exult above all things in their intellectuality; and what they have the intellect to do, that is with them the only limit to intellectual action; that is, their own will is to them the highest law:  hence to ruin another by outwitting and circumventing him is their characteristic pastime; and if they can do this through his virtues, all the better.  Iago’s moral creed may be summed up in two of his aphoristic sayings,—­“Virtue! a fig! ’tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus”; and, “Put money in thy purse”; while Edmund wants no other reason for his exploiting than that his brother is one

    “Whose nature is so far from doing harms,
    That he suspects none; on whose foolish honesty
    My practices ride easy.”