126.  And just as womanly purity and innocence quail before unwomanly self-assertion and voluptuousness, so manly loyalty and unselfishness give way before unmanly treachery and self-seeking.  It is true that the bad men do not finally triumph, but they triumph over the good with whom they happen to come in contact.  In “King Lear,” what man shows any virtue who does not receive punishment for the same?  Not Gloucester, whose loyal devotion to his king obtains for him a punishment that is only merciful in that it prevents him from further suffering the sight of his beloved master’s misery; not Kent, who, faithful in his self-denying service through all manner of obloquy, is left at last with a prayer that he may be allowed to follow Lear to the grave; and beyond these two there is little good to be found.  But “Lear” is not by any means the climax.  The utter despair of good in man or woman rises higher in “Troilus and Cressida,” and reaches its culminating point in “Timon,” a fragment only of which is Shakspere’s.  The pen fell from the tired hand; the worn and distracted brain refused to fulfil the task of depicting the depth to which the poet’s estimate of mankind had fallen; and we hardly know whether to rejoice or to regret that the clumsy hand of an inferior writer has screened from our knowledge the full disclosure of the utter and contemptuous cynicism and want of faith with which, for the time being, Shakspere was infected.

127.  Before passing on to consider the plays of the third period as evidence of Shakspere’s final thought, it will be well to pause and re-read with attention a summing-up of Shakspere’s teaching as it has been presented to us by one of the greatest and most earnest teachers of morality of the present day.  Every word that Mr. Ruskin writes is so evidently from the depth of his own good heart, and every doctrine that he enunciates so pure in theory and so true in practice, that a difference with him upon the final teaching of Shakspere’s work cannot be too cautiously expressed.  But the estimate of this which he has given in the third Lecture of “Sesame and Lilies"[1] is so painful, if regarded as Shakspere’s latest and most mature opinion, that everybody, even Mr. Ruskin himself, would be glad to modify its gloom with a few rays of hope, if it were possible to do so.  “What then,” says Mr. Ruskin, “is the message to us of our own poet and searcher of hearts, after fifteen hundred years of Christian faith have been numbered over the graves of men?  Are his words more cheerful than the heathen’s (Homer)? is his hope more near, his trust more sure, his reading of fate more happy?  Ah no!  He differs from the heathen poet chiefly in this, that he recognizes for deliverance no gods nigh at hand, and that, by petty chance, by momentary folly, by broken message, by fool’s tyranny, or traitor’s snare, the strongest and most righteous are brought to their ruin, and perish without word of hope.  He, indeed, as part of his rendering