Mr. Whibley, I fear, comes badly off from the test.  One does not blame him for having written on the theme that “Shakespeare, being a patriot, was a Tory also.”  It would be easy to conceive a scholarly and amusing study of Shakespeare on these lines.  Whitman maintained that there is much in Shakespeare to offend the democratic mind; and there is no reason why an intelligent Tory should not praise Shakespeare for what Whitman deplored in him.  There is every reason, however, why the portraiture of Shakespeare as a Tory, if it is to be done, should be done with grace, intelligence, and sureness of touch.  Mr. Whibley throws all these qualifications to the winds, especially the second.  The proof of Shakespeare’s Toryism, for instance, which he draws from Troilus and Cressida, is based on a total misunderstanding of the famous and simple speech of Ulysses about the necessity of observing “degree, priority and place.”  Mr. Whibley, plunging blindly about in Tory blinkers, imagines that in this speech Ulysses, or rather Shakespeare, is referring to the necessity of keeping the democracy in its place.  “Might he not,” he asks, “have written these prophetic lines with his mind’s eye upon France of the Terror or upon modern Russia?” Had Mr. Whibley read the play with that small amount of self-forgetfulness without which no man has ever yet been able to appreciate literature, he would have discovered that it is the unruliness not of the democracy but of the aristocracy against which Ulysses—­or, if you prefer it, Shakespeare—­inveighs in this speech.  The speech is aimed at the self-will and factiousness of Achilles and his disloyalty to Agamemnon.  If there are any moderns who come under the noble lash of Ulysses, they must be sought for not among either French or Russian revolutionists, but in the persons of such sound Tories as Sir Edward Carson and such sound patriots as Mr. Lloyd George.  It is tolerably certain that neither Ulysses nor Shakespeare foresaw Sir Edward Carson’s escapades or Mr. Lloyd George’s insurbordinate career as a member of Mr. Asquith’s Cabinet.  But how admirably they sum up all the wild statesmanship of these later days in lines which Mr. Whibley, accountably enough, fails to quote: 

  They tax our policy, and call it cowardice;
  Count wisdom as no member of the war;
  Forestall prescience, and esteem no act
  But that of hand; the still and mental parts—­
  That do contrive how many hands shall strike,
  When fitness calls them on, and know, by measure
  Of their observant toil, the enemies’ weight—­
  Why, this hath not a finger’s dignity. 
  They call this bed-work, mappery, closet-war: 
  So that the ram, that batters down the wall,
  For the great swing and rudeness of his poise,
  They place before his hand that made the engine,
  Or those that with the fineness of their souls
  By reason guide his execution.

There is not much in the moral of this speech to bring balm to the soul of the author of the Letters of an Englishman.