field" and remained estranged and alienated from the peaceful world, the citizen-life, the state of market or home, the arts, cultivation, enjoyment, and repose. He was a "full soldier", to whom the flinty and steel couch of war was as a thrice-driven bed of down. In his speeches all his images and comparisons are taken from the wars, the sea, or the chase. When landing in Cyprus, he has just escaped the tumult of the elements, his heart is opened and his tongue loosened, and contrary to his habit he is then talkative, kindly, and tender; in deeds and dangers he finds the source of cheerful vigour. There is his spirit, his range of sight, his power of mind, his cool determination; the noblest gifts and acquirements of his nature are at their highest point, when dangers surround him: it is a picture full of greatness, which Iago draws of his immoveable calmness, which never left him even when the cannon scattered his battle-array, and tore his own brother from his side. To this inclination for deeds and adventures, this delight in bold and threatening enterprises, he has yielded under the impulse of an heroic nature, journeying by land and sea to the ends of the earth to behold its terrors and its wonders. He had been in "antres vast and desarts idle"; he had had "hair-breadth scapes i'th'imminent deadly breach"; he had been taken prisoner, and sold to slavery and again redeemed; he had seen

"Cannibals that each other eat,

The anthropophagi, and men whose heads

Do grow beneath their shoulders".

So he told Desdemona, when he was least inclined for fable; he informed the senate of Venice of this narration,

when the most accurate truth was his duty and his interest; the strongest sincerity lay besides in his nature and principles. He, therefore, must have believed, he had actually seen those marvels of distant regions; his southern fancy had mingled with his power of observation; or he related only from hearsay*; credulity and superstition betray at any rate his origin and the power of his imagination; and these are traits, which it behoves us to hold in lively remembrance, in order subsequently to comprehend the incredible and fatal exercise of these very qualities. Deeply is the belief in mysterious powers rooted in that redundant imagination, which is so natural in the hunter, the sailor, and the adventurer. The magic, with which he invests the handkerchief, his wedding-gift to Desdemona, is not merely feigned, to increase its value and significance in her estimation; she receives it so trustfully, that she questions not his belief in such wonderful powers; and other places there are, where he speaks credulously of the omen of a "raven o'er the infected house", and the influence of the moon upon the spirits of men. With this previous history, Othello had entered the service of the Venetian state. He had become so naturalized there, that like a patriot he held the honour of the state as his own honour: this he showed at Aleppo, when in the midst of the enemy's land, he stabbed the Turk who insulted Venice by striking a Venetian. By his warlike deeds he had made himself

Thus as Sir Walter Raleigh in the description of his journey to Guiana in 1595, tells of the cannibals, amazons, and the headless people of Ewaipanoma, on which Shakespeare, according to commentators, must have thought in this passage of the wonders of Othello's journey; although he may just as well have had Mandeville before him.

indispensable to the state; he was "all in all" to the senate; the people and public opinion, "the sovereign mistress of effects" were on his side. Only among the noble and the higher classes has he open enemies and enviers; those who have the privileges, have ever the prejudices too. We hear, indeed, in what tone Iago and Rodrigo speak of the "black devil" and "the thick-lips"; we hear, how poisonously Iago, under the mask of good intention, tells him to his face, what prejudices as to his colour and birth are circulated in Venice; we see plainly, at what a distance he was regarded by Brabantio, at whose house he was even a favoured guest. In the eyes of these people, he was not the deserving warrior of their country, but a vagrant, vagabond, foreign barbarian; the finger of scorn pointed at him, and he felt it. That he should meet his enemies with disregard and contempt, lay in his proud nature; we hear, that he rejected important requests for Iago; we see him opposing the pride of the senator's cap (Brabantio) by the assertion of his own royal birth; if he treats as he does the powerful and influential father-in-law in the moment of closest union, how might he have acted in the case of provocation! There rested upon him as upon the descendants of the Jewish people, the stain of unequal birth and the fate of expulsion; the more his services emancipated him, the more sensitive, one may believe, would he be to the prejudices, which yet. remained. But before he attained to this position, throughout his whole life, resentment and bitterness must have been planted in his spirit through this paria-condition. The feeling of disregard oppressed him; disunion with the world, discord with men raged concealed within; this gave him the grave expression, the silent reserved nature, that

brooded deeply over thoughts and conceptions; it gave him the inclination, so common with rugged characters, to yield himself up to soft compliant dispositions, to the apparent honesty of the hypocritical Iago, to the pliable Cassio, and entirely to the gentle Desdemona. There was a time, when this feeling of rejection called forth in him a disturbance within, which with one of his strongly expressive comparisons, he called "chaos", and which he shudders to look back upon. He had cooled his hot Moorish blood, but he could not change it. He had learned to repress his raging temperament in the school of circumstances, but these struggles, one thinks, had become hard to him and had often been fruitless. If from some just and heavy cause the flood-gates of restrained passion gave way, then his condition became "perplexed in the extreme", stubborn obstinacy seized him, and the out-burst of frightful emotions betrayed the inherent power of his nature, threatened his mind with distraction, and overcame even his body with spasms and faintness.

But the degree, in which Othello exercised self-command, the measure of self-possession and power over his passions, which he acquired, this it is, which attracts us to him still more, than his deeds and warlike talent. The profession of arms had invested him with calmness, firmness, severe discipline, and strength of will and purpose; these qualities related to his innermost nature and influenced his intercourse with men. He could no longer refine his habits after a long camp-life according to the gentle fashion of courtly society, but he disciplined them like a soldier. He had cooled down his anger and zeal on principle. As we become acquainted with him, he leaves upon

every one around him the impression of a mastery over self, firmly to be relied upon; he appears to all a man of large heart, one not easily irritated, whom no passion decides, and whose firm virtue no chance or fate can shake. On the ground of this inward repose, the beautiful qualities of his mind appear the more clearly. A warrior, knowing "little of this great world", he had no great versatility of mind; he was "little blessed with the set phrase of speech"; ignorant of the arts of cunning and craftiness, he was pliable, credulous, and easily deceived by the hypocrisy, which he perceived not. With these his mental deficiencies, the excellent natural qualities of his heart stand in the closest union. His confidence was without limits, when once established; to dissemble was difficult to him, aye, impossible; all ostentation and conceit were foreign to him; the candour, the lack of suspicion, the constancy of this true soul, his perfect kindness, his thoroughly noble nature, were acknowledged even by his enemies. With that strong self-discipline, with that calm demeanour, with this noblemindedness was united the most manly sense of honour. He had won for himself the honour, which others inherit; and he defended it with the jealousy and care, with which the possessor watches over a property, whose acquisition had been difficult. With toil had Othello thus risen to that even balance of conduct, which rests in the genuine honest self-reliance, to which his merits had advanced him. But even at this highest point of his self-contentment, we never quite lose the impression, that this self-reliance does not stand unalterably firm, that this evenness of conduct fluctuates in the balance, in one scale of which the acknowledgment he meets with, alternates with the other scale.