says the base-born Edmund, sneeringly. '_Fa sol la mi_,' he continues, producing that particular conjunction of sounds which was forbidden by the ancient musicians, on account of its unnatural discord. The monkish writers on music call it diabolical. It is at the conclusion of a very long and elaborate discussion on this question, that he treats us to this prohibited piece of harmony; and a discussion in which Gloster refers to the influence of the _planets_, this _unnaturalness_ in all the human relations--this universal jangle--'this ruinous disorder, that hunts men disquietly to their graves.' But the 'base' Edmund is disposed to acquit the celestial influences of the evil charged on them. He does not believe in men being-- 'Fools, by heavenly compulsion; knaves and thieves, by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that they are evil in, by a divine thrusting on.' He has another method of accounting for what _he_ himself is. He does not think it necessary to go quite so far, to find the origin of his own base, lawless, _inhuman, unconscionable_ dispositions. But the inquiries, which are handled so boldly in the soliloquies of Edmund, are started again and again elsewhere; and the recurrence is too emphatic, to leave any room to doubt that the author's intention in the play is concerned in it; and that this question of 'the several dispositions and characters of men,' and the inquiry as to whether there be '_any causes in_ nature' of these _degenerate_ tendencies, which he is at such pains to exhibit, is, for some reason or other, a very important point with him. That which in _contemplative philosophy_ corresponds to the _cause_, in _practical philosophy_ becomes the _rule_, the _founder_ of it tells us. But the play cannot be studied effectually without taking into account the fact, that the author avails himself of the date of his chronicle to represent that stage of human development in which the mysterious forces of nature were still blindly deified; and, therefore, the religious invocations with which the play abounds, are _not_, in the modern sense of the term, _prayers_, but only vague, poetic appeals to the unknown, unexplored powers in nature, which we call _second causes_. And when, as yet, there was no room for science in the narrow premature theories which men found imposed on them--when the new movement of human thought was still hampered by the narrowness of 'preconceived opinions,' the poet was glad to take shelter under the date of his legend now and then, here, as in Macbeth and other poems, for the sake of a little more freedom in this respect. He is very far from condemning '_presuppositions_' and '_anticipations_' but only wishes them kept in their proper places, because to bring them into the region of fact and induction, and so to falsify the actual condition of things--to undertake to face down the powers of nature with them,