Page:William Hazlitt - Characters of Shakespear's Plays (1817).djvu/353

Rh as well as if counsel had been assigned him. In one sense, Shakespear 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 shewed 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. Isabella. There spake my brother! there my father's grave Did utter forth a voice! Yes, thou must die: Thou art too noble to conserve a life In base appliances. This outward-sainted deputy— Whose settled visage and deliberate word