He brimmed with deep feeling as he replied in a steady voice, the steadiness of which was spoilt by the palpableness of his great effort to keep it so:— […]
If Thomas is rather fond of calling Geoffrey Riddell Archidiabolus instead of Archidiaconus, was it not the established joke of the Reformation to call a Bishop a Bitesheep, and to turn Cardinal Poole into Carnal Fool?]
Oh, can it be their weariness that makes them lounge so stalkily, / And wear their flesh so flaccidly, and granulate, and chalkily?
We may learn, to be sure, plenty of lessons from Shakespeare. We are not likely to have kingdoms to divide, crowns foretold us by weird sisters, a father’s death to avenge, or to kill our wives from jealously ; but Lear may teach us to draw the line more clearly between a wise generosity and a loose-handed weakness of giving ; Macbeth, how one sin involves another, and forever another, by a fatal parthenogenesis, and that the key which unlocks forbidden doors to our will or passion leaves a stain on the hand, that may not be so dark as blood, but that will not out ; Hamlet, that all the noblest gifts of person, temperament, and mind slip like sand through the grasp of an infirm purpose ; Othello, that the perpetual silt of some one weakness, the eddies of a suspicious temper depositing their one impalpable layer after another, may build up a shoal on which an heroic life and an otherwise magnanimous nature may bilge and go to pieces.
