Alike in its most palpable perplexities and in its most patent splendours, this political and philosophic and poetic problem, this hybrid and hundred-faced and hydra-headed prodigy, at once defies and derides all definitive comment.  This however we may surely and confidently say of it, that of all Shakespeare’s offspring it is the one whose best things lose least by extraction and separation from their context.  That some cynic had lately bitten him by the brain—­and possibly a cynic himself in a nearly rabid stage of anthropophobia—­we might conclude as reasonably from consideration of the whole as from examination of the parts more especially and virulently affected:  yet how much is here also of hyper-Platonic subtlety and sublimity, of golden and Hyblaean eloquence above the reach and beyond the snap of any cynic’s tooth!  Shakespeare, as under the guidance at once for good and for evil of his alternately Socratic and Swiftian familiar, has set himself as if prepensely and on purpose to brutalise the type of Achilles and spiritualise the type of Ulysses.  The former is an enterprise never to be utterly forgiven by any one who ever loved from the very birth of his boyhood the very name of the son of the sea-goddess in the glorious words of Mr. Browning’s young first-born poem,

   Who stood beside the naked Swift-footed,
   And bound [his] forehead with Proserpine’s hair.

It is true, if that be any little compensation, that Hector and Andromache fare here hardly better than he:  while of the momentary presentation of Helen on the dirtier boards of a stage more miry than the tub of Diogenes I would not if I could and I must not though I would say so much as one single proper word.  The hysterics of the eponymous hero and the harlotries of the eponymous heroine remove both alike beyond the outer pale of all rational and manly sympathy; though Shakespeare’s self may never have exceeded or equalled for subtle and accurate and bitter fidelity the study here given of an utterly light woman, shallow and loose and dissolute in the most literal sense, rather than perverse or unkindly or unclean; and though Keats alone in his most perfect mood of lyric passion and burning vision as full of fragrance as of flame could have matched and all but overmatched those passages in which the rapture of Troilus makes pale and humble by comparison the keenest raptures of Romeo.

The relative disfavour in which the play of Measure for Measure has doubtless been at all times generally held is not in my opinion simply explicable on the theory which of late years has been so powerfully and plausibly advanced and advocated on the highest poetic or judicial authority in France or in the world, that in the land of many-coloured cant and many-coated hypocrisy the type of Angelo is something too much a prototype or an autotype of the huge national vice of England.  This comment is in itself as surely just and true as it is incisive and direct:  but