may hear the divine commandments better than we, and dictate them down
to us? He is greater, but yet--and this is the point--_a man like
ourselves_ (_ομοιος_). He cannot for purposes of tragedy be
wholly good: for not only is this extremely rare in real life, and
almost inconceivable, but the ruin of a wholly good man would merely
shock, without teaching us anything. The disaster of a tragic figure
must come, and be seen to come, through some fault--or, at least, some
mistake--of his own. But again he must not be wholly bad, for the
disasters of the wholly bad do not affect us save with disgust. Such
men, we know, are not _like ourselves_. What happens to them may serve
for _The Police News_. Tragedy does not deal with the worthless. How
then are Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, beings like ourselves, to fall into
crime so heinous? Again Shakespeare strips the Idea bare: their trespass
comes through ambition, "last infirmity of noble minds," under the
blinding persuasion of witchcraft, which (an actual belief in
Shakespeare's time) is a direct negation of the moral law, and puts
Satan in place of God.

* * * * *

It is curious that, some thirty-odd years after Shakespeare had handled
this tremendous theme, another attempt on it was being meditated, and by
the man whom the most of us rank next after Shakespeare in the hierarchy
of English poets. Among the treasures in the library at Trinity College,
Cambridge, lies a manuscript, the hand-writing undoubtedly Milton's,
containing a list compiled by him of promising subjects for the great
poem for which, between his leaving the University and the outbreak of
the Civil War, all his life was a deliberate preparation. The list is
long; the subjects proposed run to no fewer than ninety-nine. Of these,
fifty-three are derived from Old Testament history (with a recurring