Which passion cannot rule.’
Now, if there is any thing of superficial gaiety or heedlessness in this, ‘it is not written in the bond:’—the breaks and stops, the pursing and knitting of the brow together, the deep internal working of hypocrisy under the mask of love and honesty, escaped us on the stage.—The same observation applies to what he says afterwards of himself:—
‘Though I perchance am vicious in my guess,
As I confess it is my nature’s plague
To spy into abuses, and oft my jealousy
Shapes faults that are not.’
The candour of this confession would hardly be extorted from him, if it did not correspond with the moody dissatisfaction, and suspicious, creeping, cat-like watchfulness of his general appearance. The anxious suspense, the deep artifice, the collected earnestness, and, if we may so say, the passion of hypocrisy, are decidedly marked in every line of the whole scene, and are worked up to a sort of paroxysm afterwards, in that inimitably characteristic apostrophe:—
‘O Grace! O Heaven forgive me!
Are you a man? Have you a soul or sense?
God be wi’ you: take mine office. O wretched fool