The characters of the two freethinking heroes are delineated consistently throughout, in keeping with these ideas, no one can say, no one has ever said, that the Poet discovers any the least prejudice against them, or any leanings of moral or personal sympathy towards their victims.  Nothing comes from him that can be fairly construed as a hint to us against warming up to them.  Nor has any one a right to say that he overdoes or overstresses their wickedness a jot:  he merely shows it, or rather lets them show it, just as it is.  He lends them the whole benefit of his genius for the best possible airing of their intellectual gifts and graces; all this too without swerving a hair from the line of cold, calm, even-handed justice:  yet how do our feelings, how do our moral sympathies, run in these cases?  I need not say they run wholly and unreservedly with the chivalrous but infirm Cassio, the honest and honour-loving Othello, the innocent though not faultless Desdemona; with the pious and unsuspecting Edgar, the erring indeed but still upright and sound-hearted Gloster.  Nay, more; we would rather be in the place of the victims than of the victors:  virtue wronged, betrayed, crushed, seems to us a more eligible lot than crime triumphant, prosperous, happy.—­Such is the moral spirit of these great delineations.

I could easily go through all the Poet’s instances of virtue and innocence in conflict or in contrast with villainy and guilt, and show that he never fails thus to keep our moral sympathies in the right place without discovering his own; that he is just as far from overdoing or overstressing the villainy of the bad as the virtue of the good; both of which fall alike under the censure of moral demonstrativeness, while, as in the two cases specified, his moral teachings, even because they thus come from Nature, not from him, therefore bring in their right hand sanctions which we cannot appeal from if we would, and would not if we could.

There is one more point on which it may be needful to say a few words.—­Johnson and others have complained that Shakespeare seems to write without any moral purpose; and that he does not make a just distribution of good and evil.  Both charges are strictly true; at least, so I hope, and so I believe.  As regards his seeming to write without any moral purpose, on the same principle he seems to write without any art.  But who does not know that the very triumph of art lies in concealing art; that is, in seeming to write without it?  And so, if the Poet writes without discovering any moral purpose, that very fact is just the highest triumph of art in the moral direction.  For no one has alleged that he seems to write with an immoral purpose.  Here, then, I have but to say that, with so consummate an artist as Shakespeare, if the charge is not true, it ought to be.  Redundancy of conscience is indeed fatal to art; but then it is also, if not fatal, at least highly damaging to morality; “for goodness, growing to a plurisy, dies in its own too much.”  Verily, a moral teacher’s first business is to clear his mind of cant.  And so much the wise and good Dr. Johnson himself will tell us.