past, present, and to come.’  He is a fine antithesis to the morality and the hypocrisy of the other characters of the play.  Barnardine is Caliban transported from Prospero’s wizard island to the forests of Bohemia or the prisons of Vienna.  He is the creature of bad habits as Caliban is of gross instincts.  He has, however, a strong notion of the natural fitness of things, according to his own sensations—­’He has been drinking hard all night, and he will not be hanged that day’—­and Shakespeare has let him off at last.  We do not understand why the philosophical German critic, Schlegel, should be so severe on those pleasant persons, Lucio, Pompey, and Master Froth, as to call them ‘wretches’.  They appear all mighty comfortable in their occupations, and determined to pursue them, ’as the flesh and fortune should serve’.  A very good exposure of the want of self-knowledge and contempt for others, which is so common in the world, is put into the mouth of Abhorson, the jailer, when the Provost proposes to associate Pompey with him in his office—­’A bawd, sir?  Fie upon him, he will discredit our mystery.’  And the same answer would serve in nine instances out of ten to the same kind of remark, ’Go to, sir, you weigh equally; a feather will turn the scale.’  Shakespeare was in one sense the least moral of all writers; for morality (commonly so called) is made up of antipathies; and his talent consisted in sympathy with human nature, in all its shapes, degrees, depressions, and elevations.  The object of the pedantic moralist is to find out the bad in everything:  his was to show that ’there is some soul of goodness in things evil’.  Even Master Barnardine is not left to the mercy of what others think of him; but when he comes in, speaks for himself, and pleads his own cause, as well as if counsel had been assigned him.  In one sense, Shakespeare was no moralist at all:  in another, he was the greatest of all moralists.  He was a moralist in the same sense in which nature is one.  He taught what he had learnt from her.  He showed the greatest knowledge of humanity with the greatest fellow-feeling for it.

One of the most dramatic passages in the present play is the interview between Claudio and his sister, when she comes to inform him of the conditions on which Angelo will spare his life.

   Claudio.  Let me know the point.

   Isabella.—­O, I do fear thee, Claudio; and I quake,
     Lest thou a feverous life should’st entertain,
     And six or seven winters more respect
     Than a perpetual honour.  Dar’st thou die? 
     The sense of death is most in apprehension;
     And the poor beetle, that we tread upon,
     In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great
     As when a giant dies.

   Claudio.  Why give you me this shame? 
     Think you I can a resolution fetch
     From flowery tenderness; if I must die,
     I will encounter darkness as a bride, And hug it in mine arms.