it will not cover by any manner of means the whole question.  The strong and radical objection distinctly brought forward against this play, and strenuously supported by the wisest and the warmest devotee among all the worshippers of Shakespeare, is not exactly this, that the Puritan Angelo is exposed:  it is that the Puritan Angelo is unpunished.  In the very words of Coleridge, it is that by his pardon and his marriage “the strong indignant claim of justice” is “baffled.”  The expression is absolutely correct and apt:  justice is not merely evaded or ignored or even defied:  she is both in the older and the newer sense of the word directly and deliberately baffled; buffeted, outraged, insulted, struck in the face.  We are left hungry and thirsty after having been made to thirst and hunger for some wholesome single grain at least of righteous and too long retarded retribution:  we are tricked out of our dole, defeated of our due, lured and led on to look for some equitable and satisfying upshot, defrauded and derided and sent empty away.

That this play is in its very inmost essence a tragedy, and that no sleight of hand or force of hand could give it even a tolerable show of coherence or consistency when clipped and docked of its proper and rightful end, the mere tone of style prevalent throughout all its better parts to the absolute exclusion of any other would of itself most amply suffice to show.  Almost all that is here worthy of Shakespeare at any time is worthy of Shakespeare at his highest:  and of this every touch, every line, every incident, every syllable, belongs to pure and simple tragedy.  The evasion of a tragic end by the invention and intromission of Mariana has deserved and received high praise for its ingenuity but ingenious evasion of a natural and proper end is usually the distinctive quality which denotes a workman of a very much lower school than the school of Shakespeare.  In short and in fact, the whole elaborate machinery by which the complete and completely unsatisfactory result of the whole plot is attained is so thoroughly worthy of such a contriver as “the old fantastical duke of dark corners” as to be in a moral sense, if I dare say what I think, very far from thoroughly worthy of the wisest and mightiest mind that ever was informed with the spirit or genius of creative poetry.

I have one more note to add in passing which touches simply on a musical point in lyric verse; and from which I would therefore give any biped who believes that ears “should be long to measure Shakespeare” all timely warning to avert the length of his own.  A very singular question, and one to me unaccountable except by a supposition which on charitable grounds I should be loth to entertain for a moment—­namely, that such ears are commoner than I would fain believe on heads externally or ostensibly human,—­has been raised with regard to the first immortal song of Mariana in the moated grange.  This question is whether the second verse appended by Fletcher to