always some redeeming point. The bloody Macbeth is kind and gentle to his wife; the gore-stained Richard, gallant and daring; Shylock is an affectionate father, and a good-natured master; Claudius, in Hamlet, is fond of his foully-won queen, and exhibits, at least, remorse for his deed in heart-rending soliloquies; Angelo is upright in public life, though yielding to sore temptation in private; Cloton is brutal and insulting, but brave; the ladies are either wholly without blemishes, or have merits to redeem them: in some plays, as Julius Cæsar, Coriolanus, Antony and Cleopatra, Romeo and Juliet, and several others, no decidedly vicious character is introduced at all. The personages introduced are exposed to the frailties of our nature, but escape from its grosser crimes and vices.

But Iago! Ay! there's the rub. Well may poor Othello look down to his feet, and, not seeing them different from those of others, feel convinced that it is a fable which attributes a cloven hoof to the devil.* His next test

"While the Moor bears the nightly color of suspicion and deceit only on his visage, Iago is black within. He haunts Othello like his evil genius, and with his light (and therefore the more dangerous) insinuations, he leaves him no rest; it is as if by means of an unfortunate affinity, founded however in nature, this influence was by necessity more powerful over him than the voice of his good angel Desdemona. A more artful villain than this Iago was never portrayed; he spreads his nets with a skill which nothing can escape. The repugnance inspired by his aims becomes tolerable from the attention of the spectators being directed to his means: these furnish endless employment to the understanding. Cool, discontented, and morose, arrogant where he dare be so, but humble and insinuating when it suits his purposes, he is a complete master in the art of dissimulation; accessible only to selfish emotions, he is thoroughly skilled in rousing the passions of others, and of availing himself of every opening which they give him: he is as excellent an observer of men as any one can be who is unacquainted with higher motives of action from his own experience; there is always some truth in his malicious observations on them. He does not merely pretend an obdurate incredulity as to the virtue of women, he actually entertains it; and this, too, falls in with his whole way of thinking, and makes him the more fit for the execution of his purpose. As in every thing he sees merely the hateful side, he dissolves in the rudest manner the charm which the

"If that thou be'st a devil, I can not kill thee"*

affords a proof that Iago is not actually a fiend, for he wounds him; but still he can not think him any thing less than a " demidevil," being bled, not killed. Nor is it wonderful that the parting instruction of Lodovico to Cassio should be to enforce the most cunning cruelty of torture on the hellish villain, or that all the party should vie with each other in heaping upon him words of contumely and execration. He richly deserved them. He had ensnared the soul and body of Othello to do the most damnable actions; he had been the cause of the cruel murder of Desdemona; he had killed his own wife, had plotted the assassination of Cassio, had betrayed and murdered Roderigo. His determination to keep silence when questioned was at least judicious :

"Demand me nothing: what you know, you know;
From this time forth I never will speak word"-

for, with his utmost ingenuity, he could hardly find any thing to say for himself. Is there nothing, then, to be said for him by any body else?

No more than this. He is the sole exemplar of studied personal revenge in the plays. The philosophical mind of Hamimagination casts over the relation between the two sexes: he does so for the purpose of revolting Othello's senses, whose heart otherwise might easily have convinced him of Desdemona's innocence. This must serve as an excuse for the numerous expressions in the speeches of Iago from which modesty shrinks. If Shakespeare had written in our days he would not perhaps have dared to hazard them; and yet this must certainly have greatly injured the truth of his picture."-SCHLEGEL.

* After this line he wounds Iago. Then follows:

"Lod. Wrench his sword from him.

Iago. I bleed, sir, but not killed."

This is strange language. Should it not be "I [i. e., Ay, as usual in Shakespeare], bled, sir, but not killed"? — W. M.

† In the late Professor Wilson's latest writings ("Christopher under Canvass"), one of the Dies Boreales-April, 1850-is devoted to an eloquent though desultory dialogue-criticism on the tragedy of "Othello." He says

let ponders too deeply, and sees both sides of the question too clearly, to be able to carry any plan of vengeance into execution. Romeo's revenge on Tybalt for the death of Mercutio is a sudden gust of ungovernable rage. The vengeances in the historical plays are those of war or statecraft. In Shylock, the passion is hardly personal against his intended victim. A swaggering Christian is at the mercy of a despised and insulted Jew. The hatred is national and sectarian. Had Bassanio or Gratiano, or any other of their creed, been in his power, he would have been equally relentless. He is only retorting the wrongs and insults of his tribe, in demanding full satisfaction, and imitating the hated Christians in their own practices :

"And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?

If we are like you in the rest, we will

Resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong

that Iago "hated Othello for not promoting him, but Cassio. That seems to me the real, tangible motive - -a haunting, goading, fretting preference— an affront—an insult-a curbing of power-wounding him where alone he is sensitive-in self-esteem and pride. See his contempt for Cassio as a book-warrior-and 'for a fair life'-simply like our notion of a 'milksop.' It is added that "a singular combination in him is his wily Italian wit-like Jachimo's - the -and his rough, soldier-like, plain, blunt, jovial manners tone of the camp, and of the wild, luring, reckless camp-plenty of hardihood-fit for toil, peril, privation. You never for a moment doubt his courage, his presence of mind, his resources. He does not once quail in presence of Othello at his utmost fury. He does not stir up the lion from without, through the bars of his cage, with an invisible rod of iron—that is, a whip of scorpions; he lashes up the Wild Beast, and flinches not an inch from fury that would smite, or tusk that would tear-a veritable lion-queller and king." Wilson also thinks that Iago was even affected by the color of Othello; 'no doubt, with more hate and aversion at being commanded and outshone by him. High military rank and command-high favor by the Senate high fame and esteem in the world-high royalty of spirithappiness in marriage all these in Othello are proper subjects of envy, and motives of hate in Iago. The Nigger!"-On the other hand, Coleridge calls Iago's a motiveless malignity." - The ostensible motives are anger at Cassio being placed over his head, and jealousy on account of his suspicions that Othello has been too intimate with Emilia, his wife. He avows bothparticularly the latter. —M.

A Christian, what is his humility?

Revenge!

[And] if a Christian wrong a Jew, what should

His sufferance be by Christian example?

Why, [sir], revenge! The villainy you teach me

I'll execute, and it shall go hard, but

I'll better the instruction."*

It is, on the whole, a passion remarkably seldom exhibited in Shakespeare in any form. Iago, as I have said, is its only example, as directed against an individual.†

Iago had been affronted in the tenderest point. He felt that he had strong claims on the office of lieutenant to Othello, who had witnessed his soldierly abilities.

* Printed as prose in the editions. The insertion of and before if, where it may serve as the ordinary copulative—or as the common form, an if, perpetually recurring, as in Romeo, "an if a man did need a poison now;" [on which form I may remark, in passing, Horne Tooke talks ignorantly enough, in his "Diversions of Purley"]—and of a monosyllable between why and revenge, makes the whole passage metrical. I am inclined to think that revenge should be repeated in the concluding lines. "If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? REVENGE!" If, on the contrary, a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be?

"REVENGE! REVENGE! The villainy you teach me
I'll execute."

As an editor I might scruple to exhibit the text thus. I should recommend
it to an actor in place of the prosaic and unmetrical-Why, revenge.-W. M.
† Dr. Ulrici places Iago as the "manifest opposite" of Othello, describes
him as
"the white-washed, hypocritical power of evil," and adds, “his is a
selfish, half-animal nature, which is unable to control its desires and passions
simply because it has never made the attempt. The mere semblance of vir-
tue easily deceives the open, unsuspecting Othello. He, indeed, is the prey
of a vulgar jealousy: he hates Othello, because he believes him, on no other
ground than his own unreasonable suspicions, guilty of adultery with his
wife Emilia. With Iago, honor, even in its worldly acceptation, is a mere
pretence. Honor, with him, means nothing but external influence and repu-
tation-it matters not how acquired. In this sense, too, he is jealous; for
he hunts Othello and Cassio into his toils simply because the former has pre-
ferred the latter to himself. These are the motives of all his conduct, which
form the groundwork of the tragic plot. Even as the mere organic opposite
to Othello, this character was indispensable to the whole piece."-M.

"At Rhodes, at Cyprus, and on other grounds,

Christian and heathen."

The greatest exertion was made to procure it for him, and yet he is refused. What is still worse, the grounds of the refusal are military: Othello evades the request of the bowing magnificoes

"with a bombast circumstance

"Horribly stuffed with epithets of war."

He assigns to civilians reasons for passing over Iago, drawn from his own trade, of which they, of course, could not pretend to be adequate judges. And worst of all, when this practised military man, is, for military reasons, set aside, who is appointed? Some man of greater renown and skill in arms? might be borne; but it is no such thing. The choice of Othello lights upon,

That

* This is one of the most puzzling lines in Shakespeare. All the explanations are forced. Cassio had no wife, and his treatment of Bianca, who stands in place of one, is contemptuous; nor does he let her stand in the way of his duty. She tenderly reproaches him for his long absence, and he hastily sends her home, harshly saying,

"I do attend here on the general,

And think it no addition, nor my wish,

To have him see me woman'd."

Tyrwhitt reads, damned in a fair life; interpreting it as an allusion to the judgment denounced in the Gospel against those of whom all men speak well, which is very far-fetched indeed. If life were the reading, it might signify that Cassio was damned for the rough life of a soldier by the fair, i. e., the easy life he had hitherto led. Johnson gives it up, as a passage “which, for the present, must be resigned to corruption and obscurity." A writer in one of the early volumes of Blackwood's Magazine, proposed somewhat ingeniously,

A great arithmetician,

A fellow almost damned: in a fair wise,

Who never set a squadron in the field."

But this is not satisfactory. Why is Cassio a fellow almost damned? Like Dr. Johnson, "I have nothing that I can, with any approach to confidence,