to a dishonest purpose never enters her head. Moreover, in every subsequent emergency, and in Desdemona's distress, she constantly appeals to her husband; and, up to the very last scene, she bears him harmless of all suspicion.

says:

"Oh, are you come, Iago? you have done well,
That men must lay their murders on your neck."

She

And, indeed, all through the same scene, she iterates in the most natural tone of surprise to all the charges crowding in against him, "My husband!" as if she could not possibly take it into her faculties that he was capable of a treachery. She is uniformly submissive to him, till his own lips have proclaimed his calumny of Desdemona's infidelity with Cassio; and only then is it that she throws off her allegiance to him.

"Emil. Did you ever tell him she was false? Iago. I did.

"Emil. You told a lie; an odious, damned lie; Upon my soul, a lie; a wicked lie :

She false with Cassio! Did you say with Cassio?

Iago. With Cassio, mistress. Go to, charm your tongue. "Emil. I will not charm my tongue; I'm bound to speak: My mistress here lies murder'd in her bed."

And in answer to his order that she "go home," she says:

"Good gentlemen, let me have leave to speak;
'Tis proper I obey him, but not now."

The only expression that can convey any previous suspicion on her part of her husband is, when she exclaims, “Oh, villany! villany! I thought so then;" but this merely implies that she believed some treachery was on foot-by no means that her husband was the traitor; on the contrary, she is so overwhelmed, upon the discovery of his guilt, that she even

says, "I'll kill myself with grief." Every step in the plot, up to the climax of his appropriating the handkerchief, goes to prove Emilia's love for, and confidence in, her husband. Even the very act of retaining it, and telling Desdemona the deliberate lie, that she knew nothing of it, may be quoted as a desire on her part to screen him; but it is likewise a glowing example not only of the mischief accruing from indirect conduct, but of the extraordinary compromise that commonminded people make with their sense of right and wrong. It is trite enough to say, that there could have been no catastrophe, no calamity, had Emilia told the truth in the first instance; but what a lesson does the great master teach us, in working out so disastrous a consequence from such an origin!-an apparently innocuous deception and falsehood on the part of Emilia, in the first instance;—thus tracking, in short, the murder of Desdemona to her friend and champion, and not to the arch-plotter, and her bitter enemy, Iago. This, I must say, appears to me the very sublime of social moral philosophy.

The whole character of Emilia is a perfect specimen of a free woman of the world, having no evil or malice prepense in her composition; at the same time, retaining her virtue only by a slip-knot. For an exquisite portraiture of the pure and holy truth of female delicacy and conjugal love, let any one read the conversation at the close of the fourth Act between Desdemona and Emilia, while the latter is undressing her mistress for bed, (a scene-that portion at least―never acted,) and then let him rival it, if he can, from the pages of any professor of social morality. This very scene, by the way, contains one of those surprising touches of nature which indicate the headlands and promontories of genius. When Othello, who has made up his mind for the murder, bids Desdemona go early to bed, Emilia (after he is gone) says, How goes it now? He looks gentler than he did." Some

one has truly said, "An inferior dramatist would have extended that thought over two pages." Yes, and have made a flat result of it.

Another artistical contrast, showing the triumphant beauty of conjugal love, is instituted between the conduct of Desdemona and that of the courtesan, Bianca, who, nevertheless, is no offensive specimen of her class, as she would have been delineated in the coarse pages of the contemporary dramatists. When I think how Bianca would have been exhibited by Beaumont and Fletcher, Etheridge, Dryden, and Wycherly, she is a positive purist in the hands of Shakespeare. Although her career of life, and intimacy with the vilest language, are suggestive of much that might legitimately be put into her mouth, she is an absolute vestal, both in heart and tongue, compared with Iago: and, indeed, Shakespeare seems to have been incapable of originating an atrocious female character. Even the harlot Bianca possesses a strong infusion of that kindliness which "makes the whole world kin." She shows an unselfish, animal love for Cassio; and the truth of this is only allowed to appear, in the poet's artful but prodigal way, by a side-wind observation from one of the other characters. When Cassio has been assassinated in the street at night, Iago says, "Prythee, Emilia, go know of Cassio where he supped to-night." Then turning suddenly upon Bianca, he adds, "What do you shake at?" pretending to criminate her, and knowing how easily suspicion attaches to her unhappy sisterhood, he himself having wounded Cassio. Bianca answers, "He supped at my house, but I therefore shake not." What an exquisite thought to show by action, and not by profession, that the peril of him she loved had unnerved her! Shakespeare had Divine authority for knowing that such as Bianca (deluded, and then misused beings) will be received where the Pharisees and hypocrites will be rejected.

"Othello," says Coleridge, "has no life but in Desdemona : the belief that she, his angel, had fallen from the heaven of her native innocence, wrought a civil war in his heart. She is his counterpart, and, like him, is almost sanctified in our eyes by her absolute unsuspiciousness, and holy entireness of love. As the curtain drops, which do we pity most?"

Schlegel designates the play of "Othello" as a “tragical Rembrandt." The main incident of the story is indeed "dark with fierce keeping;" and the reader must retain his imagination, and his feelings too, completely under control, who can rise from an absorbed attention to its steadily-accumulating and grievous catastrophe, without feeling harassed and exhausted by reason of its intense reality.

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