in the social diagrams which the original plot presented; and, indeed, the whole story of the Duke of Gloster, which is from first to last a clear Elizabethan invention, and of which this of Edmund is but a part, was not less essential for the same purpose. Neither does one need to go very far beneath the surface, to perceive a new and extraordinary treatment of the ethical principle in this play throughout; one which the new, artistic, practical 'stand-point' here taken naturally suggested, but one which could have proceeded only from the inmost heart of the new philosophy. It is just the kind of treatment which the proposal to introduce the Inductive method of inquiry into this department of the human practice inevitably involved. A disposition to go behind the ethical phenomena, to pursue the investigation to its scientific conclusion, a refusal to accept the facts which, to the unscientific observation, appear to be the ultimate ones--a refusal to accept the coarse, vague, spontaneous notions of the dark ages, as the solution of these so essential phenomena, is everywhere betraying and declaring itself. Cordelia's agonised invocation and summons to the unpublished forces of nature, to be aidant and remediate to the good man's distress, is continually echoed by the poet, but with a broader application. It is not the bodily malady and infirmity only--it is not that kind of madness, only with which the poor king is afflicted in the later stages of the play, which appears to him to need scientific treatment--it is not for the cure of these alone that he would open his Prospero book, 'nature's infinite book of secresy,' as he calls it in Mark Antony--'the true magic,' as he calls it _elsewhere_--the book of the unpublished laws--the scientific book of 'KINDS'--the book of 'the historic laws'--'the book of God's power.' All the _interior_ phenomena which attend the violation of duty are strictly omitted here. That psychological exhibition of it belongs to other plays; and the Poet has left us, as we all know, no room to suspect the tenderness of his moral sensibility, or the depth of his acquaintance with these subjective phenomena. The _social_ consequences of the violation of duty in all the human relationships, the consequence to _others_, and the _social reaction_, limits the exhibition here. The object on which our sympathies are chiefly concentrated is, as he himself is made to inform us-- 'One more sinned _against_, than sinning.' 'Oh, these eclipses do portend these divisions,'