of mine, long since dead, who refused to condemn almost anything, whether there were any vices that he could not find it in his heart to tolerate.  He replied at once that there were two—­cruelty, and bilking; which, if the word is not academic, I may paraphrase as cheating the helpless, swindling a child out of its pennies, or leaving a house by the back door in order to avoid paying your cabman his lawful fare.  These exclusions from mercy Shakespeare would accept; and I think he would add a third.  His worst villains are all theorists, who cheat and murder by the book of arithmetic.  They are men of principle, and are ready to expound their principle and to defend it in argument.  They follow it, without remorse or mitigation, wherever it leads them.  It is Iago’s logic that makes him so terrible; his mind is as cold as a snake and as hard as a surgeon’s knife.  The Italian Renaissance did produce some such men; the modern German imitation is a grosser and feebler thing, brutality trying to emulate the glitter and flourish of refined cruelty.

With his wonderful quickness of intuition and his unsurpassed subtlety of expression Shakespeare drew the characters of the Englishmen that he saw around him.  Why is it that he has given us no full-length portrait, carefully drawn, of a hypocrite?  It can hardly have been for lack of models.  Outside England, not only among our enemies, but among our friends and allies, it is agreed that hypocrisy is our national vice, our ruling passion.  There must be some meaning in so widely held an opinion; and, on our side, there are damaging admissions by many witnesses.  The portrait gallery of Charles Dickens is crowded with hypocrites.  Some of them are greasy and servile, like Mr. Pumblechook or Uriah Heep; others rise to poetic heights of daring, like Mr. Chadband or Mr. Squeers.  But Shakespeare’s hypocrites enjoy themselves too much; they are artists to the finger-tips.  It may be said, no doubt, that Shakespeare lived before organized religious dissent had developed a new type of character among the weaker brethren.  But the Low Church Protestant, whom Shakespeare certainly knew, is not very different from the evangelical dissenter of later days; and he did not interest Shakespeare.

My own impression is that Shakespeare had a free and happy childhood, and grew up without much check from his elders.  It is the child who sees hypocrites.  These preposterous grown-up people, who, if they are well-mannered, do not seem to enjoy their food, who are fussy about meaningless employments, and never give way to natural impulses, must surely assume this veil of decorum with intent to deceive.  Charles Dickens was hard driven in his childhood, and the impressions that were then burnt into him governed all his seeing.  The creative spirit in him transformed his sufferings into delight; but he never outgrew them; and, when he died, the eyes of a child were closed upon a scene touched, it is true, here and there with rapturous