as I am "—his character of bonhommie not sitting at all easily upon him. In the scenes with Othello, where he has to put his passion for theoretical evil into practice, with great risk to himself, and with dreadful consequences to others, he is proportionably guarded, insidious, dark, and deliberate. Nothing ever came up to the profound dissimulation and dexterous artifice of the well-known dialogue in the third act, where he first enters upon the execution of his design. "IAGO. My noble lord. OTHELLO. What dost thou say, Iago? When you woo'd my lady, know of your love? Why dost thou ask? IAGO But for a satisfaction of my thought, No further harm. OTHELLO. Why of thy thought, Iago? IAGO. I did not think he had been acquainted with her. IAGO. Indeed? OTHELLO. Indeed! ay, indeed. Discern'st thou aught in that? Is he not honest? IAGO. Honest, my lord? OTHELLO. Ay, honest? IAGO. My lord, for aught I know. OTHELLO. What dost thou think? IAGO. Think, my lord? OTHELLO. Think, my lord? By heaven thou echo'st me, As if there was some monster in thy thought Too hideous to be shown." The stops and breaks, the deep internal workings of treachery under the mask of love and honesty, the anxious watchfulness, the cool earnestness, and if we may so say, the passion of hypocrisy marked in every line, receive their last finishing in that inimitably characteristic burst of pretended indignation at Othello's doubts of his sincerity. "O grace! O Heaven forgive me! Are you a man? Have you a soul or sense? God be wi' you; take mine office. O wretchea fool, That liv'st to make thine honesty a vice! O monstrous world! Take note, take note, O world, I thank you for this profit; and from hence I'll love no friend, since love breeds such offence." If Iago is detestable enough when he has business on his hands and all his engines at work, he is still worse when he has nothing to do, and we only see into the hollowness of his heart. His indifference when Othello falls into a swoon, is perfectly diabolical, but quite in character. "IAGO. How is it, General? Have you not hurt your head? OTHELLO. Dost thou mock me? IAGO. I mock you not, by Heaven," &c. The part indeed would hardly be tolerated, even as a foil to the virtue and generosity of the other characters in the play, but for its indefatigable industry and inexhaustible resources, which divert the attention of the spectator (as well as his own) from the end he has in view to the means by which it must be accomplished. Edmund the Bastard in Lear is something of the same character, placed in less difficult circumstances. Zanga is a vulgar caricature of it. TIMON OF ATHENS. TIMON OF ATHENS always appeared to us to be written with as intense a feeling of his subject as any one play of Shakspeare. It is one of the few in which he seems to be in earnest throughout, never to trifle or go out of his way. He does not relax in his efforts, nor lose sight of the unity of his design. It is the only play of our author in which spleen is the predominant feeling of the mind. It is as much a satire as a play and contains some of the finest pieces of invective possible to be conceived, both in the snarling, captious answers of the cynic Apemantus, and in the impassioned and more terrible imprecations of Timon. The latter remind the classical reader of the force and swelling impetuosity of the moral declamations in Juvenal, while the former have all the keenness and caustic severity of the old Stoic Philosophers. The soul of Diogenes appears to have been seated on the lips of Apemantus. The churlish profession of misanthropy in the cynic is contrasted with the profound feeling of it in Timon, and also with the soldier-like and determined resentment of Alcibiades against his countrymen, who have banished him, though this forms only an incidental episode in the tragedy. The fable consists of a single event;-of the transition from the highest pomp and profusion of artificial refinement to the most abject state of savage life, and privation of all social intercourse. The change is as rapid as it is complete; nor is the description of the rich and generous Timon, banquetting in gilded palaces, pampered by every luxury, prodigal of his hospitality, courted by crowds of flatterers, poets, painters, lords, ladies, who "Follow his strides, his lobbies fill with tendance, Rain sacrificial whisperings in his ear; And through him drink the free air”— more striking than that of the sudden falling off of his friends and fortune, and his naked exposure in a wild forest digging roots from the earth for his sustenance, with a lofty spirit of selfdenial, and bitter scorn cf the world, which raise him higher in our esteem than the dazzling gloss of prosperity could do. He grudges himself the means of life, and is only busy in preparing his grave. How forcibly is the difference between what he was, and what he is described in Apemantus's taunting questions, when he comes to reproach him with the change in his way of life! "What, think'st thou That the bleak air, thy boisterous chamberlain, Will put thy shirt on warm? will these mossed trees And skip where thou point'st out? will the cold brook, To cure thy o'er-night's surfeit? Call the creatures, Of wreakful heav'n, whose bare unhoused trunks, Answer mere nature, bid them flatter thee." The manners are everywhere preserved with distinct truth. The poet and painter are very skilfully played off against one another, both affecting great attention to the other, and each taken up with his own vanity, and the superiority of his own art. Shakspeare has put into the mouth of the former a very lively description of the genius of poetry and of his own in particular. "A thing slipt idly from me. Our poesy is as a gum, which issues From whence 'tis nourish'd. The fire i' the flint Shows not till it be struck: our gentle flame Provokes itself-and like the current flies Each bound it chafes." The hollow friendship and shuffling evasions of the Athenian lords, their smooth professions and pitiful ingratitude, are very satisfactorily exposed, as well as the different disguises to which wer the meanness of self-love resorts in such cases to hide a want of generosity and good faith. The lurking selfishness of Apemantus does not pass undetected amidst the grossness of his sarcasms and his contempt for the pretensions of others. Even the two courtezans who accompany Alcibiades to the cave of Timon are very characteristically sketched; and the thieves who come to visit him are also "true men" in their way.-An exception to this general picture of selfish depravity is found in the old and honest steward Flavius, to whom Timon pays a full tribute of tenderness. Shakspeare was unwilling to draw a picture "all over ugly with hypocrisy." He owed this character to the goodnatured solicitations of his Muse. His mind was well said by Ben Jonson to be the "sphere of humanity.” The moral sententiousness of this play equals that of Lord Bacon's Treatise on the Wisdom of the Ancients, and is indeed seasoned with greater variety. Every topic of contempt or indignation is here exhausted; but, while the sordid licentiousness of Apemantus, which turns everything to gall and bitterness, shows only the natural virulence of his temper and antipathy to good or evil alike, Timon does not utter an imprecation without betraying the extravagant workings of disappointed passion, of love altered to hate. Apemantus sees nothing good in any object, and exaggerates whatever is disgusting: Timon is tormented with the perpetual contrast between things and appearances; between the fresh, tempting outside and the rottenness within, and invokes mischiefs on the heads of mankind proportioned to the sense of his wrongs and of their treacheries. He impatiently cries out, when he finds the gold, "This yellow slave Will knit and break religions; bless the accurs'd; And give them title, knee and approbation, With senators on the bench; this is it, That makes the wappen'd widow wed again; |