engagement of marriage, his motive being the lady’s wealth; her wealth being lost, so that she could no longer hold him through his secret sin of covetousness, he had cruelly deserted her; this great wrong he had still more cruelly made use of to purchase a brighter semblance of virtue, blasting her good name with alleged discoveries of crime, and thus fattening his own reputation with the life-blood of his innocent and helpless victim.  Here was an act of extreme heartlessness and turpitude, too bad to be believed of one so ensconced in solemn plausibilities.  The matter had come privately to the Duke’s knowledge; but his tongue was tied by the official delicacies of his position.

A certain class of offences had caused a law to be passed of such overstrained severity that it broke down in the trial; so it fell into disuse, and became a dead letter,—­a perch to birds of prey, and not their terror.  From its extreme rigour, this law was extremely odious; and, as is always the case with laws so hated, the attempt to enforce it drew on a commensurate reaction of licentiousness; the law thus stimulating the evil it was meant to repress,—­a mistaken plaster inflaming the sore.  Angelo had been secretly guilty of a far worse sin than the one this law was aimed against, but had managed to fence himself about with practical impunity; nay, his crafty, sanctimonious selfishness had even turned that sin to an increase of honour, and so made it a basis of pride.  As the slumbering law does not touch his case, he is earnest to have it revived and put to work:  so the Duke, being somewhat divided between the pleadings of justice and mercy, concludes to let him try his hand.  In the discharge of his new office, which he conceives his great moral strictness to have gained for him, Angelo thinks to build his reputation still higher by striking at a conspicuous object.  In the prosecution of his scheme, he soon goes to attempting a vastly deeper breach of the very law he is enforcing than that of the man whom he has found obnoxious to its penalties.  Claudio’s offence was done when the law was sleeping.  Angelo has just awakened it, yet he proceeds against Claudio as if the latter had transgressed while the law was vigilant.  Angelo’s transgression has no such excuse, since he has himself already given new life and force to the law.  Nevertheless he persists in his design, and hardens himself to the point of resolving to “give his sensual race the rein.”  The hitherto unsuspected evil within he is now fully aware of, but looks it squarely in the face, and rushes headlong into the double crime of committing in its worst form the sin and at the same time punishing the lighter form of it with death in another.  Thus it turns out that

                     “This outward-sainted deputy—­
    Whose settled visage and deliberate word
    Nips youth i’ the head, and follies doth emmew
    As falcon doth the fowl—­is yet a devil;
    His filth within being cast, he would appear
    A pond as deep as Hell.”