summons, call her thence; and, unlike Desdemona, she could not so "with haste despatch" them as to return the same day; but the next day the good girl was sure to come again, and then there would be another repetition of Mr. Batchelor's recital.

If in one Idyll of the King we have womanly interest in tales of prowess told at second-hand,-Earl Yniol speaks, and to Geraint of Devon,

"For this dear child hath often heard me praise
Your feats of arms, and often when I paused
Hath asked again, and ever loved to hear;

So grateful is the noise of noble deeds

To noble hearts,"

in another we have manly eagerness, in kind and in degree no whit inferior, where Lavaire importunes Lancelot, "O tell us; for we live apart; you know

Of Arthur's glorious wars.' And Lancelot spoke

And answer'd him at full, as having been

With Arthur"

in the fierce fight by the Glern, and in the four wild battles by the shore of Duglas, and that on Bassa, and the war near Calidon the forest and wherever else; all told as became King Arthur and his knights.

§ V.

OTHELLO'S SOLDIERLY SIMPLICITY OF SPEECH.

Othello, Act i., Sc. 3.

RUDE in his speech, Othello claimed to be, and to have the right to be, in his address to the Senate; for from his seventh year to the present one his life had been in the tented field.

superintending the establishment of a man of his degree, she would find quite enough to occupy her, on the showing of Shakspeare's Scholar, without being called upon to soil the tips of her fingers, or hold up the train of her robe.

and its surroundings; and therefore little should he grace his cause in speaking for himself, he being no speaker, at least no orator, but a plain soldier only, conversant mainly with feats of broil and battle; yet, being put upon his defence, he would, by the gracious patience of these most potent, grave, and reverend signors, his very noble and approved good masters, deliver a "round unvarnished tale" of his relations with Brabantio's household. Let the senators, for they could afford to do so, dispense with rhetoric on his part, and hear him in his natural style, simple, and straightforward, and truthful. A rude speaker, and a round unvarnished tale; but a speaker that could speak home to them, and a tale that must tell.

Shakspeare's Antony stops short the plain speaking of bluff Enobarbus with the curt enjoinder, "Thou art a soldier only; speak no more." Later in the play this rough soldier is more courteously addressed by Pompey, "Enjoy thy plainness, It nothing ill becomes thee." Pompey's cue is to conciliate, but Antony knows his man. In the other great Roman tragedy in which Antony plays a leading part, he craftily disclaims before the Roman populace all pretence to oratorical arts:

"I am no orator, as Brutus is;

But as you know me all, a plain blunt man
For I have neither wit, nor words, nor worth,
Action, nor utterance, nor the power of speech
To stir men's blood: I only speak right on."

Hotspur declares for himself, in the military council, that he has not well the gift of tongue, and when interrupted by the arrival of a messenger announcing the near approach of the King, is avowedly glad of that excuse for cutting short his speech. Coriolanus, like the Moor of Venice, has been bred in the wars since he could draw a sword, and is "ill school'd in boulted [sifted] language; meal and bran together He throws without distinction." He is urged to conciliate the people by telling them he is their soldier, and, being bred in broils, has not the soft way that might better please them And honest old Menenius pleads with them on his behalf,

"Consider further,

That when he speaks not like a citizen,
You find him like a soldier: do not take

His rougher accents for malicious sounds,
But, as I say, such as become a soldier."

Troilus, again, avows it to be his vice, his fault, to be simply outspoken and truthful, at all costs; and he is content to be without those plausible arts of speech, wherein "the Grecians are most prompt and pregnant." Ovid's Ajax, with a not unlike sally of odious comparison, contrasts himself in this respect with Ulysses, when pleading against that consummate rhetorician for the arms of Achilles: Nec mihi dicere promptum, Nec facere est isti. So again is the man of action, chary of self-assertion in talk, thus characterized in Tacitus: Plurimum facere, et minimum ipso de se loqui. In the sixth satire of Horace there is a passage bits of which might be made to apply to Othello before the Senate, or at least to the Moor's too modest disclaimer of anything like eloquence:

"Ut veni coram, singultim pauca locutus,

Infans namque pudor prohibebat plura profari . .

Sed quod eram, narro."

Of Cimon we are told, that, like Themistocles, he was little. skilled in the graceful accomplishments of his countrymen, while devoid of that great man's smooth and artful affability; in lieu of which, however, Cimon conjoined to a certain roughness of manner that hearty and ingenuous frankness which ever conciliates mankind, especially in free states, and which is yet more popular when, as in his case, united to rank. A contrast to him, in very many respects, we have in the Emperor Maximian, the rusticity of whose appearance and delivery betrayed in the most elevated fortune the meanness of his extraction: "War," says Gibbon, “was the only art which he professed"-and Mamertinus expresses a doubt whether his hero, this Sirmian peasant, in imitating the conduct of Hannibal and Scipio, had ever heard of their names. The arts of persuasion, so diligently cultivated by the first Cæsars, were neglected, says their historian, "by the military ignorance and Asiatic pride of their successors; and if they con

descended to harangue the soldiers, whom they feared, they treated with silent disdain the senators, whom they despised." The remark is made with reference to the exceptional instance of Julian, who set up for orator, not without making good his pretensions. Another exception may be cited in the instance of Valentinian, whose military life had indeed diverted his youth from pursuits of literature, and who was ignorant of Greek, and of the arts of rhetoric; but as the mind of the orator was never disconcerted by timid perplexity, he was able, as often as the occasion prompted him, to deliver his decided sentiments with bold and ready elocution. Nor be forgotten Gibbon's description of Ali, who was eloquent speaker as well as valiant soldier: "And every antagonist, in the combats of the tongue or of the sword, was subdued by his eloquence and valour." Like Beaumont and Fletcher's Alberto,

"a blunt soldier

May borrow so much from the oil'd-tongued courtier,"

as will serve his turn, if the loan can be well placed, and profitably employed. But only your born orator is likely to acquit himself well, when it comes to oratory; and the better policy in the main is Almada's:

"Tis not my gift to play the orator,

But in plain words to lay our state before you."

When Du Molay was called on to defend the Order of his imperilled brotherhood, the Templars, he professed himself an unlearned man, incompetent for such a task, at any rate without counsel to aid him, but he would do, and did, his best. Gerald de Caus had just two days before him made a like reply, deprecatory and remonstrant: he was a simple soldier, he told the Court, without house, arms, or land: he had neither ability nor knowledge to defend the Order. Shan O'Neil was urgent with Queen Bess that Her Majesty should make every allowance for his inbred rudeness and incivility.*

*Like the Highland hero of John Home's tragedy, when he tells Lady Randolph (very much as the Moor tells the Senate):

"To go to our gracious Sovereign, before whom all words must be lackered over either with gilding or with sugar, is such a confectionery matter as clean baffles my poor old English brain," quoth honest Blount, in Kenilworth. Cœur de Lion in the Talisman makes this his style of apology to the assembled princes: "Richard is a soldier-his hand is ever readier than his tongue-and his tongue is but too much used to the rough language of his trade." So again the noble Constable De Lacy, in Scott's other Tale of the Crusaders: "I have been too long trained in camps and councils to express my meaning otherwise than simply and plainly." And that blunt

soldier Le Balafre, in Quentin Durward, though he could make a shift to express himself intelligibly enough to King Lewis, to whose familiarity he was habituated, breaks down altogether in his attempt to address an assembly,-a veritable man of war, not words.

In the Imaginary Conversation-not one of Walter Savage Landor's many, but Lord Macaulay's single one-between Milton and Cowley, the greater poet reproaches the lesser for assuming Cromwell to have been of a mean capacity because he was an ungraceful orator, and never said, either in public or private, anything memorable. Sure this is unjust," says Milton; and he goes on to show how many men there have been ignorant of letters, without wit, without eloquence, who yet had the wisdom to devise, and the courage to perform, that which they lacked language to explain. "Such men often, in troubled times, have worked out the deliverance of nations and their own greatness, not by logic, not by rhetoric," but by wariness in success, by calmness in danger, by fierce and stubborn resolution in all adversity. When a popular Prime Minister of a past generation sat down again after addressing the House, their general impres

In speech and manner; never till this hour
Stood I in such a presence."

But Shan O'Neil could not have gone on saying with Norval to Glenalvon, "Sir, I have been accustom'd all my days

To hear and speak the plain and simple truth."