so pure, he may nevertheless become the sport of blind chance or ruthless wickedness?  May a Hamlet, patiently struggling after truth and duty, be put upon and abused by the darker powers?  May Macbeth, who would fain do right, were not evil so ever present with him, be juggled with and led to destruction by fiends?  May an undistinguishing fate sweep away at once the good with the evil—­Hamlet with Laertes; Desdemona with Iago; Cordelia with Edmund?  And above the turmoil of this reign of terror, is there no word uttered of a Supreme Good guiding and controlling the unloosed ill—­no word of encouragement, none of hope?  If this be so indeed, that man is but the puppet of malignant spirits, away with this life.  It is not worth the living; for what power has man against the fiends?  But at this point arises a further question to demand solution:  what shall be hereafter?  If evil is supreme here, shall it not be so in that undiscovered country,—­that life to come?  The dreams that may come give him pause, and he either shuffles on, doubting, hesitating, and incapable of decision, or he hurls himself wildly against his fate.  In either case his life becomes like to a tale

    “Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
     Signifying—­nothing!”

125.  It is strange to note, too, how the ebb of this wave of scepticism upon questions relating to the immaterial world is only recoil that adds force to a succeeding wave of cynicism with regard to the physical world around.  “Hamlet,” “Macbeth,” and “Othello” give place to “Lear,” “Troilus and Cressida,” “Antony and Cleopatra,” and “Timon.”  So true is it that “unfaith in aught is want of faith in all,” that in these later plays it would seem that honour, honesty, and justice were virtues not possessed by man or woman; or, if possessed, were only a curse to bring down disgrace and destruction upon the possessor.  Contrast the women of these plays with those of the comedies immediately preceding the Hamlet period.  In the latter plays we find the heroines, by their sweet womanly guidance and gentle but firm control, triumphantly bringing good out of evil in spite of adverse circumstance.  Beatrice, Rosalind, Viola, Helena, and Isabella are all, not without a tinge of knight-errantry that does not do the least violence to the conception of tender, delicate womanhood, the good geniuses of the little worlds in which their influence is made to be felt.  Events must inevitably have gone tragically but for their intervention.  But with the advent of the second period all this changes.  At first the women, like Brutus’ Portia, Ophelia, Desdemona, however noble or sweet in character and well meaning in motive, are incapable of grasping the guiding threads of the events around them and controlling them for good.  They have to give way to characters of another kind, who bear the form without the nature of women.  Commencing with Lady Macbeth, the conception falls lower and lower, through Goneril and Regan, Cressida, Cleopatra, until in the climax of this utter despair, “Timon,” there is no character that it would not be a profanity to call by the name of woman.