come and to dust we shall return, is common. But Warburton has shown that, in the Pentateuch at least, there is no mention of a future state; and in the rest of the Old Testament there are very slight traces of the idea: it is not introduced as a belief. It was reserved for the new dispensation, in the example of its revealer, to prove a resurrection. The common use of these words and sentiments by Shakspere and the writers of the Old Testament only show their common purposes and belief.

Belarius, who did not sing, says, over Imogen and Cloten :

The ground that gave them first has them again :
Their pleasure here is past, so is their pain

More commonly, as thinking little of life, Shakspere makes death the end of the cares rather than the joys of life, the cura rather than the gaudia. The ancients generally put them together. Cæsar, a man of pleasure, speaking of another man of pleasure, Catiline, gives both. Cicero, more serious, only the cura. These expressions have been adduced against them as material.

Imogen, on awaking, says :

I tremble still with fear:

Good faith

But if there be

Yet left in heav'n as small a drop of pity

As a wren's eye, fear'd gods! a part of it!

This is one of the many sentences blaspheming God out of heaven,' as an author called them, which abound in Shakspere. Here this scepticism of the mercy of heaven is given to a woman, and expressed with more gentleness than by the but was it suitable to feminine character? Ought it to have been introduced in a prayer to a higher power? When she is asked by Lucius, the Roman general, who she is?

men;

she answers:

I am nothing; or if not,
Nothing to be were better.

In giving a false name to the body, she

says:

Richard du Champ. If I do lie, and do
No harm by it, though the gods hear, I hope
They'll pardon it.

Pisanio says immediately afterwards :—

Wherein I'm false I'm honest; not true to be true.

That the end justifies the means we believe was the morality of Shakspere-that the measure of truth or falsehood was in the consequences, and, by reason of those, might change places, truth become falsehood, and falsehood truth, from the nature of things and not of words.

Posthumus says:—

-Gods, if you
Should have ta'en vengeance on my faults, I ne'er
Had liv'd to put on this; so had you sav'd
The noble Imogen to repent; and struck
Me, wretch, more worth your vengeance. But alack
You snatch some hence for little faults; that's love,
To have them fall no more; you some permit
To second ills with ills, each elder worse,

And make them dread it to the doer's thrift.

This is spoken reproachingly of heaven, and seems the irony of Shakspere on a Providence, or a sort of denial of its interference by a description of the course of nature. After this objurgation, however, this objection to the ways of Providence, and pointing out how it might have done something else, he says:

But Imogen's your own. Do your best wills,

And make me blest t' obey!

Very religious! but coming in this place, from Shakspere, it appears merely the assumption of such language, given to make character, or in irony of the pious.

Posthumus, in prison, delivers himself of a long soliloquy. He speaks of death being the physician who cures us of our ills, partly as Roderigo in Othello. He prefers his lot to that of those whom Claudio envied under every possible affliction. Not being a Christian, though very Christian-like, he had no dread of an after life, which Hamlet surmised might be, and which Claudio pictured in heterodox and orthodox realities. He asks :

Is't enough I'm sorry?
So children temporal fathers do appease ;
Gods are more full of mercy.

I know you are more clement than vile men,
Who of their broken debtors take a third,
A sixth, a tenth, letting them thrive again
On their abatement: that's not my desire;

For Inogen's dear life take mine; and though
"Tis not so dear, yet 'tis a life; you coined it.
"Tween man and man they weigh not every stamp,
Though light, take pieces for the figure's sake;
You rather mine, being yours; and so, great Powers,
If you will take this audit, take this life,

And cancel those cold bonds. Oh, Imogen!

I'll speak to thee in silence.

The relation between debtors and creditors is a Jewish injunction in the Scriptures coming from divine inspiration, and surely to take part is more merciful than to take the whole.

After having just told the gods that they are more merciful than men, and then giving an example of it in what would prove them less merciful, he ridicules Providence and prayer, which says forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. This may not be intentionally irreverential on the part of Shakspere-it may be only the failure of an endeavour to give religion to character, which Shakspere was not equal to, not feeling it, though he borrowed from the sources of revealed religion; which, recoined by him, cannot pass as true piety. He had been too much exercised in the craft of irreligion.

Johnson says of the last lines, 'This equivocal use of bonds is another instance of our author's infelicity in pathetic speeches.' He might have said in religious, and we think he thought this of the rest of the speech. We think Shakspere has shown no felicity in putting a religious speech into the mouth of one condemned to die, crowned as it is with a bad pun-but much more felicity in unburdening himself in mockery of heaven and the gods, which he immediately proceeds with in an apparition he shows to Posthumus. After having put a sort of Christian speech in the mouth of Posthumus, giving him some religious expressions sadly tortured, in Aristophanic manner and language he introduces Providence on the stage to be made subject of ridicule and invective.

Pope, to extricate Shakspere, supposes the whole vision to be an interpolation. At once we point out a sentiment coincident in Lear.

The father of Posthumus, Sicilius, begins:

No more, thou thunder-master, show

Thy spite on mortal flies.

Here we have the idea that he is the disposer of the thunder storm no more to be feared in death; and the idea of Gloster in Lear, that he shows his spite on us as boys make sport with flies.

With Mars fall out, with Juno chide,

That thy adulteries

Rates and revenges.

Then the father asks if his son has done aught but well; and says that dying before his son was born, Posthumus attended nature's law, irrespective of Providence; but that men reported of Jupiter, as we do of God, that he was the orphan's father, which he ought to have shown, and protected him from the world's disasters.

The mother begins by reproaching Lucina for dying in childbed, and that her child came crying into the world amongst foes, a thing of pity. Whilst nothing but ill is said of the gods, respect is shown to nature as if a distinct power. This mother says that he was mocked with calamities; and Sicilius asks of the gods 'why did they suffer them?' After the family have respectively recited their merits, and said they deserved better at the hands of divinity, they thus break forth into reproaches:

1 Bro. Then, Jupiter, thou king of gods,
Why hast thou thus adjourn'd

The graces for his merits due,

Being all to dolours turned?

Sici. Thy crystal window ope; look out
No longer exercise,

Upon a valiant race, thy harsh

And potent injuries.

Moth. Since, Jupiter, our son is good,

Take off his miseries.

Sici. Peep through thy marble mansion, help,

Or we poor ghosts will cry,

To th' shining synod of the rest,

Against thy deity.

2 Bro. Help, Jupiter, or we appeal,

And from thy justice fly.

Jupiter descends in thunder and lightning, sitting upon an eagle, and throws a thunder-bolt. The ghosts fall on their knees.

Jupit. No more, you petty spirits of region low,
Offend our hearing; hush!-How dare you, ghosts,
Accuse the thunderer, whose bolt you know,
Sky-planted, batters all rebelling coasts?
Poor shadows of Elysium; hence, and rest
Upon your never-withering banks of flowers.
Be not with mortal accidents oppress'd,

No care of yours it is; you know 'tis ours.
Whom best I love I cross; to make my gift
The more delay'd, delighted. Be content,
Your low-laid son our godhead will uplift;
His comforts thrive, his trials well are spent ;
Our jovial star reign'd at his birth, and in

Our temple was he married. Rise, and fade!
He shall be Lord of Lady Imogen.

And happier much by his affliction made.
This tablet lay upon his breast, wherein

Our pleasure his full fortune doth confine;
And so, away. No farther with your din

Express impatience, lest you stir up mine.
Mount, eagle, to my palace crystaline.

Shakspere thus far, in the whole of this scene, having disparagingly set forth and ridiculed the notions of Providence in a religious man, by an admixture of the serious and the burlesque, proceeds to reason against and make the subject of his jests his ideas of a future state. The Gaoler enters to

tell him he must be hanged, and asks if he is ready for death. Posthumus says he is ever roasted, as if already this world's misfortunes were sufficient hell without any more fire in another. The Gaoler says:

Hanging is the word, sir; if you be ready for that, you are well cooked.

As if he thought Posthumus might have mistaken his meaning. He was not a ghostly father; he had nothing to do with preparations for death or after death, his office only looked to the readiness for hanging. The Gaoler then is very jocose on the acquittance which death purchases from so many ills:

O the charity of a penny cord! it sums up thousands in a trice. You have no true debitor or creditor but it. Of what's past, is, and to come the discharger: your neck, sir, is pen, book, and counters; so the acquittance follows.

Here we have the debtor and creditor again of Posthumus's