1 3 2 Shakspeare 



person ? Had nothing been known of the first 

 half of the life of Saul, the fierce Jewish persecu- 

 tor, a suggestion that Paul, the enthusiastic apostle 

 of Christianity to the Gentiles, had ever been Saul 

 would have been scouted as blasphemous ; and if 

 Augustine in his Confessions had not with com- 

 placent remorse re-savoured the lickerish taste of 

 his youthful sensualities, it would have been thought 

 a monstrous slander to hint at the licentious life 

 of the saintly Bishop of Hippo. So also with a 

 more adequate mental equipment for its task 

 might literary criticism cease to marvel at Burns 

 as a monstrous incongruity because of the mixture 

 of gross sensuality and fine spirituality he was. 

 The truth is that there is nothing strange in such 

 combination of seeming contraries ; the strange 

 thing is to think them strange ; and the ideal 

 designer of a perfect human being who should 

 go about to eliminate the material part from his 

 composition would make but a poor devirilized 

 and devitalized product in the end. It is not the 

 way of nature, it is the custom of cloistered critics 

 only, to make organic disunities, for nature's 

 frequent fashion is 



To mingle beauty with infirmities, 

 And pure perfection with impure defeature. 

 Again : — 



But no perfection is so absolute 

 That some impurity does not pollute. 



Humanity has lived untold thousands of years 

 on earth, but it has not yet had time to become 

 perfect or even to fashion a perfect human being ; 



