herself: "The suspicion that Romola was a supernatural form was dissipated, but their minds were filled instead with the more effective sense that she was a human being whom God had sent over the sea to command them."

The Brown Woman in Hood's Tylney Hall, an accepted fortune-teller, owes her repute to a shrewd and subtle foresight as to the probable course of human affairs, the conscious result simply of her sagacity, experience, and knowledge of the world. Her dominion is but "the power of a strong mind over weak ones;" but her reputation invests her with respect and awe in the eyes of the vulgar, "while from servants and retainers it procured private goodwill and unbounded confidence, furnishing her with a circumstantial history of the past and present in exchange for the glimmerings she chose to give of the future." And these domestic confidences may be said, as in so many other such cases, to have constituted her working capital. Trust her, and such as her, to put it out at good interest. Like la devineuse or divineresse of La Fontaine :

"Son fait consistait en addresse:
Quelques termes de l'art, beaucoup de hardiesse,
Du hasard quelquefois, tout cela concourait,
Tout cela bien souvent faisait crier miracle."

And devineresse takes the pas of devineux, sorceress of sorcerer, witch of wizard, by prescriptive precedence of the sex in such matters. When the lacquey in Molina's Don Gil in the Green Pantaloons finds at last that his master is his mistress, he begins a form of exorcism; but, being assured that she, Don Gil, alias Doña Juana, is only a woman, he philosophically remarks that all the mischief and mystery are accounted for:

"That word explains the whole;
Ay, and if thirty worlds were going mad,
It would be reason good for all the uproar."

Mr. Disraeli tells us, in Tancred, there are spells of social sorcery more potent than all the necromancy of Merlin or Friar Bacon." The metamorphosis of Juliana in The Honeymoon so amazes her father that he is eager to know by what

preternatural arts and devices Duke Aranza can have wrought

the change.

Jul.

"What spell, what cunning witchcraft

Has he employ'd?

None: he has simply taught me

To look into myself; his powerful rhetoric

Has with strong influence impress'd my heart,

And made me see at length the thing I have been,
And what I am, sir."

But the dramatic literature of all countries would embarrass us with riches of illustrative matter. Not to be further embarrassed, let us take but two citations from Schiller, of varied import the one is where Queen Isabel taunts the soldiers with their dread of the Maid of Orleans:

"She a magician? Her sole magic lies

In your delusion and your cowardice."

The other is where Kennedy and Mary Stuart are discussing the fatal influence over Mary of a man like Bothwell :

Mary.

Ken.

"That despotic man

Ruled you with shameful, overbearing will,

And with his philtres and his hellish arts
Inflamed your passions.

All the arts he used

Were man's superior strength and woman's weakness.

No, no, I say. The most pernicious spirits

Of hell he must have summon'd to his aid,

To cast this mist before your waking senses."

Not Brabantio was more convinced of this, with regard to the Moor's alleged practices on Desdemona, than Kennedy in the case of the bold, bad Earl's influence over her fascinated mistress.

§ IV.

OTHELLO'S STORY Of his life.

Othello, Act i., Sc. 3.

BRABANTIO had loved the Moor, and oft invited him to the home of Desdemona,

"Still question'd me the story of my life,

From year to year, the battles, sieges, fortunes,
That I have pass'd.

I ran it through, ev'n from my boyish days
To the very moment that he bade me tell it,"-

and crowded was that recital with details as vivid as picturesque of most disastrous chances, and moving accidents. by flood and field, and hair-breadth escapes, and captivity, and redemption from captivity. But no vapouring vaunter he, after the type of Don Adriano the fantastical Spaniard, as hit off by Shakspeare's King of Navarre, who, nevertheless, has something of Brabantio's relish and faculty as, that rare thing, a good listener:

"The child of fancy [invention] that Armado hight . . .

How you delight, my lords, I know not, I;

But I protest, I love to hear him lie,

And I will use him for my minstrelsy,"

or story-telling (in a double sense). Prospero is quite ready, uninvited, to relate in full the history of his strange exile and island career; but he must have time to tell it, and the time must be of his own choosing:

"For 'tis a chronicle of day by day,

Not a relation for a breakfast, nor
Befitting this first meeting. ...

Sir, I invite your highness, and your train,

To my poor cell, where you shall take your rest
For this one night; which (part of it) I'll waste
With such discourse as, I not doubt, shall make it
Go quick away; the story of my life,

And the particular accidents, gone by,
Since I came to this isle."

If Caius Marcius be too modest, or too proud, to tell his

own story, Cominius is ready, and eager, to tell it for him, and with this promised result, that senators shall mingle tears with smiles; and "great patricians shall attend, and shrug, i' the end, admire ;" and ladies "shall be frighted, and, gladly quaked, hear more." Given a master of the art of narrative, and it need not be the doer himself of great acts that shall spell-bind an assembly. When Herodotus recited his history at the Olympic games, it was to an audience keenly sympathetic, upon whom not a phrase, scarce a word, was lost; men who listened with delight to his tales of travel, that to them were not travellers' tales-that resembled Othello's narrative, in the matter of cannibals and giants— that told of strange beasts and birds and trees, of gods 'whose very name it was impiety to utter," of towns like provinces and of rivers like seas, besides all the romance as well as history of their own dear land. But there are exceptional cases; and the rule is for the actor to stir his listeners by a personal narrative, to thrill them by associating every incident and feat and trial with the MOI qui vous parle. Odysseus, like another ancient mariner, holds fast as rapt listeners all sorts of people-a goddess herself, at one time, Circe, who sat in silence as he obeyed her commands to tell his tale. Three days and three nights had passed since he began his story in the hearing of Eumæus,—“ Unfinish'd yet; and yet I thirst to hear!" professed that worthy man ; while the travelled hero declared it might easily be made endless, more easily than ended: "Not the whole circle of the year would close My long narration of a life of woes." We think of Queen Dido and her fatal interest in that too fascinating story-teller, the Trojan wanderer, who told hist story with eloquence so pathetic. We think of Queen

* Point a'esprit critique ou moqueur, might be said of them, as of the mediæval listeners to jongleur and trouvère, the course of whose recital all were bent on following; for follow they did in thought the imaginary conflicts and prodigious adventures described, enjoying the delicious pleasure of fighting the battles o'er again without having to endure the fatigues of them in fact; identifying themselves with the hero, and with him dealing out swashing blows, and, if they got one in return, happily ensured against its dinting their armour, or even ruffling their tunic.

Isabella and her ladies hanging with eager curiosity upon the story so well told by Columbus.* We think of the "faire Medina" in Spenser, beseeching Sir Guyon of courtesy to tell from whence he came through jeopardy:

"Tell on, fayre sir,' said she, 'that dolefull tale,

From which sad ruth does seeme you to restraine;'

and of the Redcrosse Knight in another canto, plied by his royal host and hostess with requests for a recital of his feats and toils in full: "of strange adventures and of perils sad Which in his travell him befallen had," and

"Great pleasure, mixt with pitiful regard,

That godly king and queen did passionate,
Whyles they his pitiful adventures heard."

Or, being in the sphere of fiction again, we think of the Sultan pressing Fortunatus after dinner for a detailed report of his adventures; and of Formal egging on Brainworm (in Ben Jonson) to relate the manner of his services, and his devices in the wars: "They say they be very strange, and not like those a man reads in the Roman histories, or sees at Mile End." Or we think of Young Norval, in Douglas, attracted to the hermit's cell by the hermit's stories, "for he had been a soldier in his youth, and fought in famous battles." Recurring to real life, we think of elderly Prince Charles Edward, just forty years after the Forty-five, urged by Mr. Greathed in Rome to recount the tale of that enterprise, and at first reluctant, however importunately jussus, renovare that ancient and only not quite infandum dolorem ; but eventually recounting it all with great animation and an even vehement energy of manner-his marches, his battles, his victories, and his defeat, his hair-breadth escapes, and the inviolable devotion of his Highland followers, remembering whom, and their sufferings, his fortitude forsook him, and he fell to the floor in a swoon. We think of Goldsmith en

Years later, the now aged admiral had a very different kind of listener in the cold-hearted Ferdinand, to whom, by command, he gave a particular account of his latest voyage; but sadly Columbus missed the benign Queen, whose tears were ready, on occasion, as well as her everappreciative and approving smiles.