For so in fact it seems pretty clear that the forces of Nature have little sense or discernment of right and wrong:  the sunshine and the rain are rather blindly given to favouring the good and the evil indiscriminately; the plague and the thunderbolt are strangely indifferent to moral distinctions where they strike.  What of that? these things are but the under-agents of Providence in the government of the world:  whereas the inward conscience of truth and right is the immediate smile of God himself; and that is the Paradise of the truly good man’s soul, the very life of his life; he can live without happiness, but he cannot live without that.  Shakespeare’s delineations reflect, none so well, none so well as his, this great, this most refreshing article of truth; and I heartily thank him for it; yes, heartily!

So then, what though the divine Cordelia and the noble Kent die, and this too in the very sweetness and fragrance of their beauty?  Is it not, do we not feel that it is, better to die with them than to live with those who have caused their death?  Their goodness was not acted for the sake of life, but purely for its own sake:  virtue such as theirs does not make suit to Fortune’s favours, nor build her trust in them; pays not her vows to time, nor is time’s thrall; no! her thoughts are higher-reared; she were not herself, could she not “look on tempests, and be never shaken.”  And such characters as these, befall them what may, have their “exceeding great reward” in the very virtue that draws suffering and death upon them:  they need nothing more, and it is their glory and immortality not to ask any thing more.  And shall we pity them, or shall we blame the Poet, that their virtue is not crowned with Fortune’s smiles?  Nay, rather let us both pity and blame ourselves for being of so mean and miserable a spirit.

As for those poets, and those critics of poetry, who insist that in the Drama, which ought to be a just image of life as it is, there shall always be an exact fitting of rewards and punishments to moral desert; or that the innocent and the guilty, the just and the unjust, shall be perfectly discriminated in what befalls them; as for such poets and critics, I simply do not believe in them at all:  their workmanship is radically both unchristian and immoral; and its moral effect, if it have any, can hardly be other than to “pamper the coward heart with feelings all too delicate for use.”

Wherefore, if any students of Shakespeare are still troubled with such criticisms as the one in question, I recommend them to make a thorough study of the Book of Job, and not to leave it till they shall have mastered the argument of that wonderful and divine poem.  They will there find that, when the good man was prosperous, the Accuser brought against him the charge, that his serving God so well was from his being sure of good pay; and that therefore he would presently give over or slack his service, if the pay