“This hand, fast wound about thy coal-black hair,
Shall, while thy head is warm and new cut off,
Write in the dust this sentence with thy blood,—
Wind-changing Warwick now can change no more.”

But in the Titus Andronicus (act iii. sc. 1, l. 12, vol. vi. p. 472), the phrase is of doubtful meaning: it may denote the oblivion of injuries or the deepest of sorrows,—

“In the dust I write
My heart’s deep languor, and my soul’s sad tears.”

Whitney also has the lines to the praise of Stephen Limbert, Master of Norwich School (p. 173),—

“Our writing in the duste, can not indure a blaste;
But that which is in marble wroughte, from age to age, doth laste.”

It is but justice to Shakespeare to testify that at times his judgment respecting injuries rises to the full height of Christian morals. The spirit Ariel avows, that, were he human, his “affections would become tender” towards the shipwrecked captives on whom his charms had been working (Tempest, act v. sc. 1, l. 21, vol. i. p. 64); and Prospero enters into his thought with strong conviction,—

“Hast thou, which art but air, a touch, a feeling
Of their afflictions, and shall not myself,
One of their kind, that relish all as sharply,
Passion as they, be kindlier moved than thou art?
Though with their high wrongs I am struck to the quick,
Yet with my nobler reason ’gainst my fury
Do I take part: the rarer action is
In virtue than in vengeance: they being penitent,
The sole drift of my purpose doth extend
Not a frown further.”

The subject in this connection finds a fitting conclusion from the words of a later writer, communicated to me by the Rev. T. Walker, M.A., formerly of Nether Tabley, in which a free forgiveness of injuries is ascribed to the world’s great and blessed Saviour,—

“Some write their wrongs on marble, He more just
Stoop’d down serene, and wrote them in the dust,
Trod under foot, the sport of every wind,
Swept from the earth, quite banished from his mind,
There secret in the grave He bade them lie,
And grieved, they could not ’scape the Almighty’s eye.”

Whitney. Reprint, 1866, p. 431.