They have, however, led him to the plain and wide path of damnation. He can not retract his insinuations. Even if he desired, Othello will not let him :—

“Villain, be sure you prove my love a whore."

[We may observe that he still, though his suspicions are so fiercely roused, calls her his love.* It is for the last time before her death. After her guilt is, as he thinks, proved, he has no word of affection for her. She is a convicted culprit, to be sacrificed to his sense of justice.]

"Be sure of it: give me ocular proof:

Or, by the worth of mine eternal soul,
Thou hadst been better have been born a dog
Than answer my waked wrath.

Make me to see 't, or, at the least, so prove it,
That the probation bear no hinge, no loop

To hang a doubt on; or woe upon thy life!"

Iago, therefore, had no choice but to go forward. He was evidently not prepared for this furious outburst; and we may acquit him of hypocrisy when he prays Othello to let her live. But Cassio must die :

:

"He hath a daily beauty in his life

That makes me ugly."

A more urgent reason immediately suggests itself:

"And besides, the Moor

May unfold me to him; there stand I in much peril.
No-he must die."

* There is an assertion by Coleridge, that the passion of Othello is not jealousy. De Quincey, who declares that this opinion was enunciated in Coleridge's Lectures at the Royal Institution, adopts it and adds, with eloquence and truth, "To me it is evident that Othello's state of feeling was not that of a degrading, suspicious rivalship, but the state of perfect misery, arising out of this dilemma, the most affecting, perhaps, to contemplate of any which can exist, viz.: the dire necessity of loving without limit one whom the heart pronounces to be unworthy of that love." There is a great deal of reflection in the result thus reached.-M.

VOL. III.-8

The death of Desdemona involves that of Roderigo :—

men.

He must remove these

Shortly after, to silence the clamorous testimony of his wife, he must kill her. He is doomed to blood.* [As some other considerations on this point occur to us, we will defer the conclusion of our remarks on the character of Iago, and reserve them for another paper.]t

......

*The character of Iago is one of the supererogations of Shakespeare's genius. Some persons, more nice than wise, have thought this whole character unnatural, because his villainy is without a sufficient motive. Shakespeare, who was as good a philosopher as he was a poet, thought otherwise. Iago in fact belongs to a class of characters common to Shakespeare, and at the same time peculiar to him; whose heads are as acute and active as their hearts are hard and callous. . The general groundwork of the character, however, is not absolute malignity, but a want of moral principle, or an indifference to the real consequences of the actions, which the meddling perversity of his disposition, and love of immediate excitement, lead him to commit. He is an amateur of tragedy in real life, and instead of exercising his ingenuity on imaginary characters, or long-forgotten incidents, he takes the bolder and more desperate course of getting up his plot at home, casts the principal parts among his nearest friends and connections, and rehearses it in downright earnest, with steady nerves and unabated resolution. The character is a complete abstraction of the intellectual from the moral being; or, in other words, consists in an absorption of every common feeling in the virulence of his understanding, the deliberate wilfulness of his purposes, and his restless, untameable love of mischievous contrivance. In the general dialogue and reflections, which are an accompaniment to the progress of the catastrophe, there is a constant overflowing of gall and bitterThe acuteness of his malice fastens upon every thing alike, and pursues the most distant analogy of evil with provoking sagacity. His mirth is not natural and cheerful, but forced and extravagant, partaking of the intense activity of mind and cynical contempt of others in which it originates. Iago is not, like Candide, a believer in optimism, but seems to have a thorough hatred or distrust of every thing of the kind, and to dwell with gloating satisfaction on whatever can interrupt the enjoyment of others, and gratify his moody irritability.-HAZLITT.

ness.

This second paper on Iago was never published.-M.

No. VIII.-LADY MACBETH.

"Then gently scan your brother man,

More gently sister woman."-BURNS.

"Je donne mon avis, non comme bon, mais comme mien."

MONTAIGNE.

THE ladies of Shakespeare have, of course, riveted the attention, and drawn to them the sympathies, of all who have read or seen his plays. The book-trained critic, weighing words and sentences in his closet; the romantic poet, weaving his verses by grove or stream; the polished occupant of the private box; the unwashed brawler of the gallery; the sedate visitant of the pit-are touched each in his several way by the conjugal devotion and melancholy fate of Desdemona, the high-souled principle of Isabella, the enthusiastic love and tragic end of Juliet, the maternal agonies of Constance, the stern energies of Margaret of Anjou, the lofty resignation of Katharine, the wit and romance of Rosalind, frolic of tongue, but deeply feeling at heart; the accomplished coquetries of Cleopatra, redeemed and almost sanctified by her obedient rushing to welcome death at the call ringing in her ears from the grave of her self-slain husband; the untiring affection of Imogen, Ophelia's stricken heart and maddened brain, or the filial constancy of Cordelia. Less deeply marked, but all in their kind beautiful, are the inno

cence of Miranda, the sweetness of Anne Page, the meek bearing-beneath the obtrusion of undesired honors-of Anne Boleyn, the playful fondness of Jessica: but I should run through all the catalogue of Shakespeare's plays were I to continue the enumeration. The task is unnecessary, for they dwell in the hearts of all, of every age, and sex, and condition. They nestle in the bosoms of the wise and the simple, the sedentary and the active, the moody and the merry, the learned and the illiterate, the wit of the club, the rustic of the farm, the soldier in camp, the scholar in college; and it affords a remarkable criterion of their general effect, that, even in those foreign countries which, either from imperfect knowledge, defective taste, or national prejudice, set little value on the plays of Shakespeare-while Hamlet, Richard, Macbeth, King John, Lear, and Falstaff, are unknown or rejected—the names of Desdemona and Juliet are familiar as household words.

No writer ever created so many female characters, or placed them in situations of such extreme diversity; and in none do we find so lofty an appreciation of female excellence. The stories from which the great dramatists of Athens drew their plots were, in most of their striking incidents, derogatory to woman. The tale of Troy divine, the war of Thebes, the heroic legends, were their favorite, almost their exclusive sources; and the crimes, passions, and misfortunes, of Clytemnestra and Medea, Phædra and Jocastra, could only darken the scene. An adulterous spouse aiding in the murder of her long-absent lord, the king of men, returning crowned with conquest; a daughter participating in the ruthless avenging by death inflicted on a mother by a son; an unpitying sorceress killing her children to satiate rage against her husband; a faithless wife endeavoring to force her shameless love on her step-son, and by false accusation consigning him for his refusal to destruction beneath his father's curse; a melancholy queen linked in incestuous nup

tials to her own offspring: these ladies are the heroines of the most renowned of the Greek tragedies! and the consequences of their guilt or misfortune compose the fable of many more. In some of the Greek plays, as the Eumenides, we have no female characters except the unearthly habitants of heaven or hell; in the most wondrous of them all, Prometheus Fettered, appears only the mythic Io; in the Persians, only the ghost of Atossa, who scarcely appertains to womankind: in some, as Philoctetes, women form no part of the dramatis persona; in others, as the Seven against Thebes, they are of no importance to the action of the piece; or, as in the Suppliants, serve but as the Chorus; and, in many more, are of less than secondary importance. Euripides often makes them the objects of those ungallant reflections which consign the misogynic dramatist to such summary punishment from the irritated sex in the comedies of Aristophanes; and in the whole number, in the thirtythree plays extant, there are but two women who can affect our nobler or softer emotions. The tender and unremitting care of Antigone for her blind, forlorn, and aged father, her unbending determination to sacrifice her lover and her life sooner than fail in paying funeral honors to her fallen brother; and, in Alcestis, her resolute urging that her own life should be taken to preserve that of a beloved husband-invest them with a pathetic and heroic beauty. But, in the one, we are haunted by the horrid recollections of incest and fratricide; and, in the other, we are somewhat indignant that we should be forced to sympathize with an affection squandered upon so heartless a fellow as Admetus, who suffers his wife to perish in his stead with the most undisturbed conviction of the superior value of his own existence, pouring forth all the while the most melodious lamentations over her death, but never for a moment thinking of coming forward to prevent it. They are beautiful creations, nevertheless.