they are Christianly crushed, and the black confessor has crept into their consciences and spoken, and they feel that they are only poor worms, that they die dependent on the grace of a higher God, and that they in due time for their earthly evil doings must bo boiled and roasted in hell.
Although the outer stamp of heathendom still prevails in Titus Andronicus, still the character of the later Christian time begins to show itself in this piece, and the perversion in moral and civic relations which it displays is already quite Byzantine. The play certainly belongs to Shakespeare's earliest productions, though many critics deny it to him altogether; for there is in it that cruelty, that cutting predilection for the repulsive, a Titanic struggle with divine powers, such as we are wont to find in the first works of great poets. The hero, in opposition to his utterly demoralised surroundings, is a real Roman, a relic of the stern and hard old time. Did such men then still exist? It is possible, for Nature loves to preserve examples of all the creatures whose kind is perishing or undergoing change, though it be in petrifactions, such as we find on mountain-tops. Titus Andronicus is such a petrified Roman, and his fossil virtue is a real curiosity in the time of the latest Cæsars.
The disgrace and mutilation of his daughter Lavinia belongs to the most horrible scenes to be
