VII. MACUGNAGA 369

that manner, and what was not wasted, extremely weakened and saddened. Very certainly, Coriolanus and Julius Cœsar did not in the least cheer or strengthen my heart in its Monte-Rosean solitude; and as I try to follow the clue of Shakespearian power over me since, I cannot feel that it has been anywise wholesome for me to have the world represented as a place where, for that best sort of people, everything always goes wrong; or to have my conceptions of that best sort of people so much confused by images of the worst. To have kinghood represented, in the Shakespearian cycle, by Richards II. and III. instead of I., by Henrys IV. and VIII. instead of II.; by King John, finished into all truths of baseness and grief, while Henry V. is only a king of fairy tale; or in the realm of imagination, by the folly of Lear, the cruelty of Leontes, the furious and foul guilt of Macbeth and the Dane. Why must the persons of Iago and Iachimo, of Tybalt and Edmund, of Isabel’s brother and Helena’s lord, pollute, or wither with their shadows, every happy scene in the loveliest plays; and they, the loveliest, be all mixed and encumbered with languid and common work,-to one’s best hope spurious, certainly, so far as original, idle and disgraceful?-and all so inextricably and mysteriously that the writer himself is not only unknowable, but inconceivable; and his wisdom so useless, that at this time of being and speaking, among active and purposeful Englishmen, I know not one who shows a trace of ever having felt a passion of Shakespeare’s, or learnt a lesson from him.

Anyway, for good or sorrow, my student’s life, instead of mere instinct of rhythmic mimicry, began thus, not till I was six-and-twenty. It is so inconvenient to be always a year behind the Christian date, (and I am really so young of my age!) that I am going to suppose the reader’s permission to be only a quarter of a century old at Macugnaga, and to count my years henceforward by the stars instead of the clock.

138. The month of Rome and Monte Rosa was at

XXXV. 2A

[Version 0.04: March 2008]