Yet Angelo is at first not so properly a hypocrite as a self-deceiver.  For it is very considerable that he wishes to be and sincerely thinks he is, what he affects and appears to be; as is plain from his consternation at the wickedness which opportunity awakens into conscious action within him.  He thus typifies that sort of men of whom Bishop Butler says, “they try appearances upon themselves as well as upon the world, and with at least as much success; and choose to manage so as to make their own minds easy with their faults, which can scarce be done without management, rather than to mend them.”  Even so Angelo for self-ends imitates sanctity, and then gets taken in by his own imitation.  This “mystery of iniquity” locks him from all true knowledge of himself.  He must be worse before he will be better.  The refined hypocrisies which so elude his eye, and thus nurse his self-righteous pride, must put on a grosser form, till he cannot choose but see himself as he is.  The secret devil within must blaze out in a shape too palpable to be ignored.  And so, as often happens where the subtleties of self-deceit are thus cherished, he at length proceeds a downright conscious hypocrite, this too of the deepest dye.

Angelo’s original fault lay in forgetting or ignoring his own frailty.  As a natural consequence, his “darling sin is pride that apes humility.”  And his conceit of virtue,—­“my gravity, wherein (let no man hear me) I take pride,”—­while it keeps him from certain vices, is itself a far greater vice than any it keeps him from; insomuch that his interviews with Isabella may almost be said to elevate him into lust.  They at least bring him to a just vision of his inward self.  The serpent charms of self-deceit which he has so hugged are now broken.  For even so—­and how awful is the fact!—­men often wound themselves so deeply with medicines, that Providence has no way for them, apparently, but to make wounds medicinal, or, as Hooker says, “to cure by vice where virtue hath stricken.”  So indeed it must be where men turn their virtues into food of spiritual pride; which is the hardest of all sores to be cured, “inasmuch as that which rooteth out other vices causeth this.”  And perhaps the array of low and loathsome vices, which the Poet has clustered about Angelo in the persons of Lucio, Pompey, and Mrs. Overdone, was necessary, to make us feel how unspeakably worse than any or all of these is Angelo’s pride of virtue.  It can hardly be needful to add, that in Angelo these fearful traits of character are depicted with a truth and sternness of pencil, such as could scarce have been achieved but in an age fruitful in living examples of them.

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