More reasons for this action,

At our more leisure, shall I render you;

Only this one :

-Lord Angelo is precise;

Stands at a guard with envy scarce confesses
That his blood flows, or that his appetite

Is more to bread than stone: hence shall we see,
If power change purpose, what our seemers be.

Escalus puts it to Angelo, whether on the same point on which he has condemned Angelo to die, he would not have yielded to circumstances, had they occurred:

Let but your honour know,

(Whom I believe to be most strait in virtue,)
That, in the working of your own affections,
Had time coher'd with place, or place with wishing;
Or that the resolute acting of your blood

Could have attained the effect of your own purpose;
Whether you had not sometime in your life
Err'd in this point, which now you censure him,
And pulled the law upon you?

Ang. 'Tis one thing to be tempted, Escalus,
Another thing to fall. I not deny,

The jury passing on the prisoner's life,

May in the sworn twelve have a thief or two,

Guiltier than him they try. What's open made to justice,

That justice seizes on.

What know the laws,

You may not so extenuate his offence,
For I have had such faults.

Here we think Shakspere had in mind the judgment of the Saviour on the woman taken in adultery. The offence called in question was of the same sort, the sentence the same, and judgment, divine and human, was the subject of the play. Escalus says:—

Well, heaven forgive him, and forgive us all—

which Shakspere made his judge, the Duke, do at the end of the play, as he would have done at the end of the world. Elbow is a repetition of Dogberry, whose humour consists, as Escalus says, in 'misplacing:'

Elbow. I do bring in here before your honour two notorious benefactors.

Ang. Benefactors? Well, what benefactors are they? Are they not malefactors ?

Elb. If it please your honour, I know not well what they are but precise villains they are, that I am sure of; and void of all profanation in the world, that good christians ought to have.

This is subservient to the design of the piece in its inuendoes against the professors of piety. The void of all profanation, which good Christians ought to have,' applies to the charge the Puritans made against our author, and which he answers by a jeer. Elbow says he knows from his wife that it was a bad-house where he took the prisoners :

Who, if she had been a woman cardinally given, might have been accused in fornication, adultery, and all uncleanness there.

The word used for carnally was a joke at the expense of the Roman Catholics, relating to the Cardinal, who, sent over by the Pope to Henry VIII., was, according to report, taken by the officers in a bad-house.' The clown says, 'he'll be supposed upon a book,' which is Shakspere's ridicule of the way of taking an oath. The clown tells Escalus he shall follow his trade:

As the flesh and fortune shall better determine. Whip me! No, no; let carman whip his jade; The valiant heart's not whipt out of his trade.

Whipping, in Shakspere's time, being the cure for unlawful preaching or playing. The Provost says of Claudio:-

He hath but as offended in a dream,

All sects, all ages smack of this vice; and he
To die for it.

Not only is this a defence of the sin, but an imputing of it to all sects. In the beginning of her intercession with Angelo, Shakspere describes her as open to the reproaches of Lucio for her coldness. We think Shakspere unfolds the doctrine of the necessitarians, when Angelo, on being asked by Isabella to pardon her brother, says :

I will not do't.

Isab. But can you if you would?

Ang. Look, what I will not, that I cannot do.

Isab. But might you do't, and do the world no wrong,
If so your heart were touched with that remorse,
As mine is to him?

Isabella first speaks of the natural attributes of mercy in the words of Portia in the Merchant of Venice, and Tamora in Titus Andronicus. But when that and other reasons have no effect upon him, Isabella, as natural to her sacred character, uses the strongest argument which religion gives for mercy:

Alas! alas !

Why, all the souls that were, were forfeit once ;
And He that might the advantage best have took,
Found out the remedy. How would you be,
If He, which is the top of judgment, should
But judge you, as you are? O, think on that:
And mercy then will breathe within your lips,
Like man new made.

Warburton says it is false divinity that those that were forfeit are saved.

The doctrine of the redemption is here fully delivered. Portia uttered much the same sentiment to the Jew. In the case of Clarence pleading for his own life, it was struck out by authority as impious, and condemned by Knight. Thus much of religion was necessary to the character of a woman, a Christian, and a nun. However, this appeal receives no answer, and religion, morality, and reason, all fall inefficacious. Isabella then makes a transition from piety to paganism:

Could great men thunder

As Jove himself does, Jove would ne'er be quiet;
For every pelting, petty officer

Would use his heaven for thunder;

Nothing but thunder.- -Merciful Heaven!

Thou rather with thy sharp and sulphurous bolt
Split'test the unwedgeable and gnarled oak,

Than the soft myrtle: But man! proud man!
Drest in a little brief authority,

Most ignorant of what he's most assured,
His glassy essence, like an angry ape,

Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven,

As make the angels weep; who, with our spleens,

Would all themselves laugh mortal.

These fine lines are yet strangely heterodox. Glittering with phrases, 'high heaven' and 'angels-the immortality of

the soul (of which the Christian is so confident) is firmly denied. In what stronger language was man ever taunted with 'being ignorant of what he's most assured'-'his glassy essence' the soul? Shakspere, like Lawrence, would cut up man with a knife, and amid the exposed parts challenge the identification or detection of the immortal spirit. Man is but an ape.' Isabella

says:

We cannot weigh our brother with ourself: Great men may jest with saints; 'tis wit in them;

But, in the less, foul profanation.

Luc. Thou'rt right, girl; more o' that.

Isab. That in the captain's but a choleric word, Which in the soldier is flat blasphemy.

All after the first line in these quotations does not correspond to the subject-the general question of libel not being relative to one of life or death for a mere matter-of-fact crime, which Isabella is arguing. But Shakspere thrusts in his own sentiments, on a question which touched him, and where the law and observances of society were very unequal. This pleased Lucio, who, from experience, knew he was open to some reflection. Shakspere made Falstaff express the same sentiment as the nun, who, a second time, would explain what blasphemy is, and lays herself open to the query of the officer and profane jester. Was she 'advised' of that? We think all this points to what was considered profanation and blasphemy in Shakspere's time, of which he was considered guilty. No doubt then Shakspere had the disadvantage of being the less, and might complain that what was allowed as wit in the great, was considered in him profanation and blasphemy. What would he have thought of time making him change places, he becoming great, and not only his profanation and blasphemy becoming allowable wit, 'deep satire,' but taken as an indication of a reverential mind? It was not necessary for Isabella to defend blasphemy, or to speak of it; had it anything to do with her she would have had to speak against it and against its pardon, but she makes here the best possible defence of free expression of opinion. Isabella then speaks more like

the Saviour to the Jews who brought before him the woman taken in adultery. She tells Angelo to go to his heart to knock there, ask of it if he had committed anything like Claudio's fault, or if he would not have done so had occasion offered. She calls the sin itself a 'natural guiltiness.' This is coming round to a more lenient estimation of the offence, such as agreed with the design of Shakspere, and she put it to Angelo to sound a thought against her brother's life, as Jesus to the sinless Jews to throw a stone against the adulteress. Angelo falls, and as he says it is Isabella's virtue which subdues him: he was one who had guided his choice by reason and could not believe in love, and he is now a victim to the passion, which, pure or impure, it is the purpose of the play to make omnipotent. Angelo, as Knight shows, uses an image from the Bible, and would pray but cannot, which seems to expose the Puritan, and how little his religion can withstand sin. Angelo reasons on prayer as the king in Hamlet, and pleads necessity for compliance with his passions. He uses much sophistry in his arguments with Isabella, and she is no less skilful in reply. From her admission of the frailty of her sex, he urges necessity in the religious form of predestination, as an excuse for the sin which he is about to propose to her :

Ang. I think it well;

And from this testimony of your own sex,

(Since I suppose we're made to be no stronger,

Than faults may shake our frames,) let me be bold:

I do arrest your words: be that you are,

That is, a woman; if you're more, you're none.

If you be one, (as you are well expressed

By all external warrants,) shew it now,

By putting on the destin❜d livery.

Her destiny ran counter not only to Angelo's purposes, but to her own in the end compared to the beginning of the play.

The Duke, habited as a friar, is introduced to Claudio to perform the last sad office of religion. Instead of talking as a priest, giving the consolations of religion, holding out the hope of a better place in a world to come, and the pardon of his sins before a more merciful judge than the one he had met with upon earth-he speaks to Claudio as a philosopher, counsels