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Should I therefore tell you, that all the Othellos, Hamlets, Hotspurs, Mackbeths, and Brutus's, whom you may have seen since his time have fallen far short of him: This still would give you no idea of his particular excellence. Let us see then what a particular comparison may do! whether that may yet draw him nearer to you?
The enterprising weekly paper that had offered the furnished house and the life income to the person who found the assassin received an intimation from the Government that such a lottery could not be allowed. The paper, therefore, returned to Limericks, and the amateur detectives, like so many Othellos, found their occupation gone.
It is easy, then, in fancy, to people these silent canals with plumed gallants and fair ladies with Shylocks in gaberdine and sandals, venturing loans upon the rich argosies of Venetian commerce with Othellos and Desdemonas, with Iagos and Roderigos with noble fleets and victorious legions returning from the wars.
There seems no reason why he should not have continued, year after year, to produce Othellos, Hamlets, and Macbeths; instead, he turned over a new leaf, and wrote Coriolanus.
In actual life, and among strong positive natures, the deepest feelings find no vent in the effervescence of passionate verbal outbreaks, and outside the charmed precincts of the tragic stage, the world would not tolerate the raving Hamlets and Othellos, the Macbeths and Medeas, that scowl and storm and anathematize so successfully in the magic glow of the footlights.
Let the writer of fiction give us humanity in all its phases, the comic as well as the tragic, the ridiculous as well as the sublime; but let him not lower the standard of character or the aim of life. Shakespeare does not. We delight in his Falstaffs and his clowns as well as in his Hamlets and Othellos, but he never familiarizes us with what is base and mean.
We may sit and gaze from the boxes at our Othellos and Biancas; we may laugh at the silly heart-burnings between Cousin Kate and Cousin Lucy in the ball-room, or the squabbles of Mary and Sally in the kitchen over the gardener's lad; but there the thing remains.
It is easy, then, in fancy, to people these silent canals with plumed gallants and fair ladies with Shylocks in gaberdine and sandals, venturing loans upon the rich argosies of Venetian commerce with Othellos and Desdemonas, with Iagos and Roderigos with noble fleets and victorious legions returning from the wars.
And hundreds, nay, thousands more in this book, whereof it must be said, that beautiful or not, in the eyes of the present generation and many of them are put into very beautiful language, and refer to very beautiful natural objects they are not beautiful really and in themselves, because they are mere conceits; the analogies in them are fortuitous, depending not on the nature of the things themselves, but on the private fancy of the writer, having no more real and logical coherence than a conundrum or a pun; in plain English, untrue, only allowable to Juliets or Othellos; while their self-possession, almost their reason, is in temporary abeyance under the influence of joy or sorrow.
"However, poor Stanis had begged me so urgently to do him that service; he was so very much in love with Madame de Fréjus, and among the characters in the play there was a brute of a husband who was terribly jealous and suspicious; one of those Othellos who have always a flea in their ear, and come back unexpectedly from shooting or the club, who pick up pieces of torn paper, listen at doors, smell out meetings with the nose of a detective, and seem to have been sent into the world only to be cuckolds, but who know better than most how to lay a snare, and to play a nasty trick that when I went to Venice, I consented to let him have my room.
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