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the text of Shakespeare and others are on a level with the worst ever proposed by the most presumptuous futility of the most preposterous among commentators. And yet no sane or candid student will question the incomparable value of Coleridge's finest critical work. Such a student, whether of literature or of history, will do his best, by the light of such faculties as nature may have given him, to see what are and what are not the worse and the better qualities, the weakness and the strength, the unwisdom and the wisdom, the ignoble and the honourable aspects of any character or of any work which he may undertake to examine and to judge. Nor will he care overmuch whether impertinence and folly may or may not misread and misrepresent his conclusions or his words. The question, for instance, with regard to Mary Stuart, is not whether it is better or worse to commit murder and adultery than to be a coward and a fool, but whether a person brought up where adultery and murder were regarded less as mortal than as venial sins, and less as venial sins than as social distinctions, is likely to be unaffected by the atmosphere of such an education, or is as culpably responsible for its results as either a woman or a man would be for absolute and scandalous deficiency in wellnigh the only virtue which even in that society was unanimously exacted and esteemed. To confound the statement of this question with acceptance or approval of the views on ethical matters which were then and there prevalent would be the veriest lunacy of rabid error; to affect such a misconstruction, and to use it as a plea or a handle for disingenuous attack, would be the veriest dotage of drivelling inso. lence. Reserving always as unquestionable and indisputable the primal and instinctive truths of æsthetics as of ethics, of art as of character, of poetry as of conduct, we are bound under penalty of preposterous failure, of self-convicted and self-