action of the story, the most perfect in tragic passion is Othello. There is nothing to determine unhappiness to the lives of the two principal per

sons.

Their love begins auspiciously; and the renown, high favour, and high character of Othello, seem to promise a stability of happiness to himself and the wife of his affections. But the blood

which had been scorched in the veins of his race, y under the suns of Africa, bears a poison that swells up to confound the peace of the Christian marriagebed. He is jealous; and the dreadful overmastering passion which disturbs the steadfastness of his own mind, overflows upon his life and her's, and consumes them from the earth. The external action of the play is nothing-the causes of events are none; the whole interest of the story, the whole course of the action, the causes of all that happens, live all in the breast of Othello. The whole destiny of those who are to perish lies in his passion. Hence the high tragic character of the playshowing one false illusory passion ruling and confounding all life. All that is below tragedy in the passion of love is taken away at once by the awful character of Othello, for such he seems to us to be designed to be. He appears never as a lover—but at once as a husband; and the relation of his love made dignified, as it is a husband's justification of his marriage, is also dignified, as it is a soldier's relation of his stern and perilous life. It is a courted, not a wooing, at least unconsciouslywooing love; and though full of tenderness, yet is

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it but slightly expressed, as being solely the gentle affection of a strong mind, and in no wise a passion.

And I loved her, that she did pity them." Indeed he is not represented as a man of passion, but of stern, sedate, immoveable mood. "I have seen the cannon, that, like the devil, from his very arm puffed his own brother"-and can he be angry? Montalto speaks with the same astonishment, calling him respected for wisdom and gravity. Therefore, it is no love story. His love itself, as long as it is happy, is perfectly calm and serene, the protecting tenderness of a husband. It is not till it is disordered that it appears as a passion. Then is shown a power in contention with itself—a mighty being struck with death, and bringing up from all the depths of life convulsions and agonies. It is no exhibition of the power of the passion of love, but of the passion of life vitally wounded, and selfovermastering. What was his love? He had placed all his faith in good-all his imagination of purity, all his tenderness of nature upon one heart; and at once that heart seems to him an ulcer. It is that recoiling agony that shakes his whole body that having confided with the whole power of his soul, he is utterly betrayed-that having departed from the pride and might of his life, which he held in his conquest and sovereignty over men, to rest himself upon a new and gracious affection, to build himself and his life upon one beloved heart, having found a blessed affection, which he had passed through life without knowing,

--and having chosen, in the just and pure goodness of his will, to take that affection instead of all other hopes, desires, and passions, to live by,-that at once he sees it sent out of existence, and a damned thing standing in its place. It is then that he feels a forfeiture of all power, and a blasting of all good. If Desdemona had been really guilty, the greatness would have been destroyed, because his love would have been unworthy-false. But she is good, and his love is most perfect, just, and good. That a man should place his perfect love on a wretched thing, is miserably debasing, and shocking to thought; but that, loving perfectly and well, he should, by hellish human circumvention, be brought to distrust, and dread, and abjure his own perfect love, is most mournful indeed-it is the infirmity of our good nature, wrestling in vain with the strong powers of evil. Moreover, he would, had Desdemona been false, have been the mere victim of fate; whereas, he is now in a manner his own victim. His happy love was heroic tenderness; his injured love is terrible passion; and disordered power, engendered within itself to its own destruction, is the height of all tragedy. The character of Othello is perhaps the most greatly drawn, the most heroic of any of Shakspeare's actors; but it is, perhaps, that one also of which his reader last acquires the intelligence. The intellectual and warlike energy of his mind- his tenderness of affection-his loftiness of spirit-his frank, generous magnanimity-impetuosity like a thunderbolt, and

that dark fierce flood of boiling passion, polluting even his imagination-compose a character entirely original; most difficult to delineate, but perfectly delineated.

Hamlet might seem to be the intellectual offspring of Shakspeare's love." He alone, of all his offspring, has Shakspeare's own intellect. But he has given him a moral nature that makes his character individual. Princely, gentle, and loving; full of natural gladness, but having a depth of sensibility which is no sooner touched by the harsh events of life than it is jarred, and the mind for ever overcome with melancholy. For intellect and sensibility blended throughout, and commensurate, and both ideally exalted and pure, are not able to pass through the calamity and trial of life: unless they are guarded by some angel from its shock, they perish in it, or undergo a worse change. The play is a singular example of a piece of great length, resting its interest upon the delineation of one character; for Hamlet, his discourses, and the changes of his mind, are all the play. The other persons, even his father's ghost, are important through him; and in himself, it is the

There is great truth and no little acumen in this remark; for it may, without fear of contradiction, be asserted that the character of Hamlet is that of a man of very extraordinary and exalted genius, and the only instance, perhaps, on the stage of such a delineation, and of the whole interest of a play turning on the construction and aberrations of the mind of one individual.

variation of his mind, and not the varying events of his life, that affords the interest. In the representation, his celebrated soliloquy is perhaps the part of the play that is most expected, even by the common audience. His interview with his mother, of which the interest is produced entirely from his mind-for about her we care nothing-is in like manner remarkable by the sympathy it excites in those, for whom the most intellectual of Shakspeare's works would scarcely seem to have 'been written. This play is perhaps superior to any other in existence for unity in the delineation of character.

We have yet to speak of the most pathetic of the plays of Shakspeare-Lear. A story unnatural and irrational in its foundation, but at the same time a natural favourite of tradition, has become, in the hands of Shakspeare, a tragedy of surpassing grandeur and interest. He has seized upon that germ of interest which had already made the story a favourite of popular tradition, and unfolded it into a work for the passionate sympathy of allyoung, old, rich and poor, learned and illiterate, virtuous and depraved. The majestic form of the kingly-hearted old man-the reverend head of the broken-hearted father-"a head so old and white as this"-the royalty from which he is deposed, but of which he can never be divested-the father's heart, which, rejected and trampled on by two children, and trampling on its one most young and duteous child, is, in the utmost degree, a father's