ver present with him, be juggled with and led
to destruction by fiends? May an undistinguishing fate sweep away at
once the good with the evil--Hamlet with Laertes; Desdemona with Iago;
Cordelia with Edmund? And above the turmoil of this reign of terror, is
there no word uttered of a Supreme Good guiding and controlling the
unloosed ill--no word of encouragement, none of hope? If this be so
indeed, that man is but the puppet of malignant spirits, away with this
life. It is not worth the living; for what power has man against the
fiends? But at this point arises a further question to demand solution:
what shall be hereafter? If evil is supreme here, shall it not be so in
that undiscovered country,--that life to come? The dreams that may come
give him pause, and he either shuffles on, doubting, hesitating, and
incapable of decision, or he hurls himself wildly against his fate. In
either case his life becomes like to a tale

"Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying--nothing!"

125. It is strange to note, too, how the ebb of this wave of scepticism
upon questions relating to the immaterial world is only recoil that adds
force to a succeeding wave of cynicism with regard to the physical world
around. "Hamlet," "Macbeth," and "Othello" give place to "Lear,"
"Troilus and Cressida," "Antony and Cleopatra," and "Timon." So true is
it that "unfaith in aught is want of faith in all," that in these later
plays it would seem that honour, honesty, and justice were virtues not
possessed by man or woman; or, if possessed, were only a curse to bring
down disgrace and destruction upon the possessor. Contrast the women of
these plays with those of the comedies immediately preceding the Hamlet
period. In the latter plays we find the heroines, by their sweet womanly
guidance and gentle but firm control, triumphantly bringing good out of
evil in spite of adverse circumstance. Beatrice, Rosalind, Viola,
Helena, and Isabella are all, not without a tinge of knight-errantry
that does not do the least violence to the conception of tender,
delicate womanhood, the good geniuses of the little worlds in which
their influence is made to be felt. Events must inevitably have gone
tragically but for their intervention. But with the advent of the second
period all this changes. At first the women, like Brutus' Portia,
Ophelia, Desdemona, however noble or sweet in character and well
meaning in motive, are incapable of grasping the gu