it is plain to me that Shakspere lets us see a gleam from the boiling flood of scorn that raged far under his serene exterior.  The words bite; the abandonment of the satirist is complete.  He puts into the mouth of the man who is down a whole acrid and scurrilous philosophy of success and failure; and there is not a passage in Swift which can equal for venom and emphasis the ferocious words of the Athenian misanthrope.  We know nothing of Shakspere’s mood while he was writing this cruel piece, but I should imagine he must have been ready to quit the world in a veritable ecstasy of wild passion and contempt.

If we take away the literature of love and the literature of fear, we have but little left save the endless works that harp on one theme—­the remorseless savagery of civilised men toward those who fail, or are supposed to fail, in life’s grim warfare.

  “Freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky,
  That dost not bite so nigh
    As benefits forgot! 
  Though thou the waters warp,
  Thy tooth is not so sharp
    As friend remembered not!”

Those lines are hackneyed until every poetaster can quote them or parody them at will; but very few readers consider that the bitter verse summarises a whole literature.  From Homer to Tennyson the ugly tune has been played on all strings; and mankind have such a vivid perception of the truth uttered by the satirists, that they read the whole story with gusto whenever it is put into a fresh form—­and each man thinks that he at least is not one of those for whom the poet’s lash is meant.  Novel, essay, poem, play, and sermon—­all recur with steady persistence to one ancient topic; and yet men try their best to bring themselves low, as they might if Job, Shakspere, Congreve, and Tennyson had never written at all, and as though no warnings were being actually enacted all round, as on a stage.

Sometimes I wonder whether the majority of men ever really try to conceive what it is to be down until their fate is upon them.  I can hardly think it.  It has been well said that all of us know we shall die, but none of us believe it.  The idea of the dark plunge is unfamiliar to the healthy imagination; and the majority of our race go on as if the great change were only a fable devised by foolish poets to scare children.  I believe that, if all men were vouchsafed a sudden comprehension of the real meaning of death, sin would cease.  Furthermore, I am persuaded that if every man could see in a flash the burning history of the one who is down, the whole of our reasonable population would take thought for the morrow—­drink-shops would be closed, the dice-box would rattle no more, and the sight of a genuine idler would be unknown.  Not a few of us have seen tragedies enough in the course of our pilgrimage, and have learned to regard the doomed weaklings—­the wreckage of civilisation, the folk who are down—­with mingled compassion and dismay.  I have found in such cases that the