while it loathes the light and itself; but only Shakespeare could give us the first sample of that more secret and terrible knowledge which reveals itself in the brief heavy whispers that seal the commission and sign the warrant of the king.  Webster alone of all our tragic poets has had strength to emulate in this darkest line of art the handiwork of his master.  We find nowhere such an echo or reflection of the spirit of this scene as in the last tremendous dialogue of Bosola with Ferdinand in the house of murder and madness, while their spotted souls yet flutter between conscience and distraction, hovering for an hour as with broken wings on the confines of either province of hell.  One pupil at least could put to this awful profit the study of so great a model; but with the single and sublime exception of that other design from the same great hand, which bares before us the mortal anguish of Bracciano, no copy or imitation of the scene in which John dies by poison has ever come near enough to evade the sentence it provokes.  The shrill tremulous agony of Fletcher’s Valentinian is to the sullen and slow death-pangs of Shakespeare’s tyrant as the babble of a suckling to the accents of a man.  As far beyond the reach of any but his maker’s hand is the pattern of a perfect English warrior, set once for all before the eyes of all ages in the figure of the noble Bastard.  The national side of Shakespeare’s genius, the heroic vein of patriotism that runs like a thread of living fire through the world-wide range of his omnipresent spirit, has never, to my thinking, found vent or expression to such glorious purpose as here.  Not even in Hotspur or Prince Hal has he mixed with more godlike sleight of hand all the lighter and graver good qualities of the national character, or compounded of them all so lovable a nature as this.  In those others we admire and enjoy the same bright fiery temper of soul, the same buoyant and fearless mastery of fate or fortune, the same gladness and glory of life made lovely with all the labour and laughter of its full fresh days; but no quality of theirs binds our hearts to them as they are bound to Philip—­not by his loyal valour, his keen young wit, his kindliness, constancy, readiness of service as swift and sure in the day of his master’s bitterest shame and shamefullest trouble as in the blithest hour of battle and that first good fight which won back his father’s spoils from his father’s slayer; but more than all these, for that lightning of divine rage and pity, of tenderness that speaks in thunder and indignation that makes fire of its tears, in the horror of great compassion which falls on him, the tempest and storm of a beautiful and godlike anger which shakes his strength of spirit and bows his high heart down at sight of Arthur dead.  Being thus, as he is, the English masterwork of Shakespeare’s hand, we may well accept him as the best man known to us that England ever made; the hero that Nelson must have been had he never come too near Naples.