One act later, midway in the drama, and we have Leontes moved to the remorseful confession, "I have too much believed my own suspicion "—an avowal that saves him not from Paulina's plenitude of reproach: "Thy tyranny "—she will call him tyrant now-" together working with thy jealousies,-fancies too weak for boys, too green and idle for girls of nine !-O, think what they have done!" Emilia can objurgate Othello in a not unlike fashion, for Emilia and Paulina are themselves not unlike in the outspoken "courage of their opinions"-but the wife of Iago can never feel towards the Moor of Venice that loathing of indignant contempt which the wife of Antigonus cannot but feel towards the King of Sicily.

Contrasting Leontes with Othello, we feel with La Bruyère, that" s'il y a un soupçon injuste, bizarre, et sans fondement, qu'on ait une fois appellé jalousie, cette autre. jalousie. . . mériteroit un autre nom." Hermione had as much right as Desdemona to protest, in regard of her husband's jealousy, "I never gave him cause." Emilia's rejoinder is vastly more applicable to Leontes than to the Moor:

"But jealous souls will not be answer'd so;
They are not ever jealous for the cause,

But jealous for they are jealous: 'tis a monster
Begot upon itself, born on itself." *

The jealousy of Leontes, says the elder Schlegel, is not, like that of Othello, developed through all its causes, symptoms, and variations; it is brought forward at once full-grown and mature, and is portrayed as a distempered frenzy. "It is a passion with the effects of which the spectator is more concerned than with its origin, and which does not produce the catastrophe, but merely ties the knot

can detect another likeness in that fair young face, and he pushes the Infanta from him, and madly bids his pet begone.

*We might apply honest Caleb Garth's remark, "Pooh! where's the use of asking for such fellows' reasons? The soul of man when it gets fairly rotten, will bear you all sorts of poisonous toadstools, and no eye can see whence came the seed thereof.”—Middlemarch, chap. xl.

of the piece." There is a sort of jealousy which, as George Eliot says, needs very little fire: it is hardly a passion, but a blight bred in the cloudy, damp despondency of uneasy egoism. The argument of Coleridge in his celebrated Lectures was, that Othello is anything but jealous in his nature, and made so only by the machinations of Iago, while Leontes requires no prompter but his own suspicious. mind. Leontes might almost stand for Dr. Moore's picture of Zeluco, as the greatest of self-tormentors-his restless mind eternally suggesting fresh causes of disquiet to itself. Two ideas at one time were the very present plague of Zeluco-that his wife disliked him, and that she was fond of another. "There was no cure for the first, but his becoming an honest man, which was not in his nature; and the cure of the other was nearly as difficult; for to remove suspicions from the breast of a man given to jealousy, and prevent their returning, would be changing his nature.” This passion has a tendency not only to sour the temper, but to obscure the understanding; else how should “trifles, light as air, be to the jealous confirmation strong as proofs of holy writ " ? Philip of Orleans is told by Anne of Austria in a French historical romance, "Your jealousy is not merely a defect, it is a positive disease. And do you

imagine that a complaint which exists only in your own imagination can be cured? You wish it to be said you are right in being jealous, when there is no ground whatever for your jealousy." As Alcippe says in Corneille,

"La jalousie aveugle un cœur atteint,

Et, sans examiner, croit tout ce qu'elle craint."

More applicable still to Leontes is the remonstrance of Philinte addressed to Molière's misanthrope:

"Peut-être est-ce un soupçon conçu légèrement;

Et votre esprit jaloux prend parfois des chimères."

Dr. Holmes describes, in the case of one of his characters, how, "with that ingenuity which always accompanies jealousy," he tortured every circumstance to make it square with his belief. Monsieur de Villardin n John Marston Hall is another of the same type-designed to show hat there is never any telling to what acts of weakness, folly, or meanness, a suspicious nature will not reduce a man.

How characteristic of Leontes is the manner in which he suddenly resents his friend's compliance with that urgent invitation to prolong his stay, to which Hermione had been prompted by her husband. "At my request he would And his self-torturing analysis of his sensations gives force to that passage in which-a parallel to one in Othello he descants on the comparative blessedness of unrecognized calamity and wrong. He sighs at knowing

not!"*

too much.

"There may be in the cup

A spider steep'd, and one may drink; depart,
And yet partake no venom; for his knowledge
Is not infected: but if one present

The abhorr'd ingredient to his eye, make known

How he hath drank, he cracks his gorge, his sides,

With violent hefts:-I have drank, and seen the spider."

In one of Joanna Baillie's Plays on the Passions, the question is put,

"My lord, what would your gentle countess say,

If she o'erheard her own request neglected,

Until supported by a name more potent?"

In another, the Duke of Mantua eggs on Victoria to secure Count Basil's

consent

"to grace my court another day;

I shall not be offended when I see
Your power surpasses mine."

Mrs. Bertram's signs of yielding to the written appeal of Lucius Davoren arouse misgivings in her perplexed suitor: "His eloquence has more power than mine," said Geoffrey, with kindling jealousy.—It was difficult for good old Lady Margaret of Tillietudlem to forgive Claverhouse his neglect of her intercession for Henry Morton. And Major Bellenden, while upholding the supremacy of martial law, was free to own that Colonel Grahame was deficient in respect to his suppliant hostess; nor, the rebuffed veteran adds, “am I over and above pre-eminently flattered by his granting to young Evandale (I suppose because he is a lord, and has interest with the privy-council) a request which he refused to so old a servant of the king as I am."-Mr. Trollope's Miss Mackenzie has a conscience in these matters of preferential concession. Pressed to stay by Lady Ball, and declining, she cannot, on that account, yield afterwards, as she inclines to do, when pressed by that "nice-looking, smoothfaced young fellow," Jack. She must not, by invidious compliance with the request of the grandson, give the grandmother the right to exclaim with bitterness,

"At my request, she would not."

Hence these violent heavings-as of one that would be rid of the abomination too wittingly gulped down.*

Leontes is hardly a whit better than that fairy-tale emperor in Valentine and Orson, whose unworthy treatment

* At the inn at Terracina, Geoffrey Crayon took note at dinner-time of what appeared to be a dish of stewed eels," of which an Englishman present ate with great relish, but "had nearly refunded them" when told that they were vipers, caught among the rocks of Terracina, and esteemed a great delicacy.

Pallet, in Peregrine Pickle, was almost gluttonous over a so-called "fricassee of rabbit," and declared it to be one of the best he ever tasted. But a convulsive reaction, described in Smollett's least refined style, ensued, when Tom Piper reported the connexion of that dish with what he had seen hanging by the pantry-door, in the shape of "the skin and feet of a special ram-cat, new flayed."

Such tricks are sometimes played in real life; but, as there are strong stomachs as well as queasy ones, not always with success. Sir Eardley Wilmot, in his memoirs of Mr. Assheton Smith, notes how a steak from Baronet, Sir James Musgrave's horse, was served up at Melton, and how William Cooke, after “partaking of it," was told what he had been eating, -but, instead of being disgusted, he immediately called out for another cut from the same steak. This was before hippophagy had come to be accepted as one of the triumphs of civilization.

Lord Anson's crew had a pronounced dislike to seal's flesh, until they agreed together to call it lamb-and by dint of "pretending very much" that it was lamb, they came to like it well enough. Such is the power of names, or the force of imagination!-Miss Leslie, in her Recollections of Lisbon, speaking of kids as much eaten in Portugal, remarks that it is not altogether safe to venture on one, unless you are quite sure that it is not a cat. "I am still uneasy with a misgiving, that at a table not our own, I did eat a slice of grimalkin kid; and I can never be quite certain that I did not. I must say, however, that whether of the feline species or not, it looked and tasted well." And what more would the signora have? Could she not let good digestion wait on appetite, without fostering imaginative misgivings to spoil all? If the drink went down well, why should she insist on seeing the spider?

In the Ixovopayia of Erasmus, a story is told of a bachelor of divinity dying of consumption, who, from theological scruples, and though urged by his bishop to comply, resisted all the advice of his physicians to have recourse to a diet of eggs and milk. At last, when it became evident that he would die rather than follow a prescription which would compel him to break the fasts of the church, it was determined to practise a deception upon him, and a drink was accordingly prepared of eggs and goat's milk,

of his unjustly suspected empress his very courtiers cry shame on Hermione-like, Bellisant is repudiated, together with her infant child. This is the Kitely type of jealousy that, as a pestilence, affects and infects.

"The houses of the brain. First it begins

Solely to work upon the phantasy,

Filling her seat with such pestiferous air

As soon corrupts the judgment; and from thence
Sends like contagion to the memory:

Still each to other giving the infection,

which he eagerly swallowed. Within a few days he began to get better, and went on gaining strength until a servant-maid revealed the trick, when he immediately began to vomit up again what he had eaten.

Then again in the Tischreden of Luther may be read how a rich Jew, on his death-bed, ordered that his remains should be conveyed to Ratisbon, and how his friends, to save heavy toll, packed the carcase in a barrel of wine, and how the carriers, ignorant of the solid contents, tapped the barrel, and "swilled away right joyously, till they found out they had been drinking Jew's pickle. How it fared with them then, you may imagine." Among the early English metrical romances is one concerning convalescent Richard Lion-heart's violent longing for pork, after his attack of ague in the Holy Land: pork was not easily to be had in so anti-porcine a region. But an old knight was equal to the emergency :

"Take a Saracen, young and fat ;

In haste let the thief be slain,
Open'd, and his skin off flayn ;
And sodden full hastily

With powder and with spicery,
And with saffron of good colour.

*

The king ate the flesh and gnew the bones,

And drank well after for the nonce.

And when he had eaten enough,

His folk hem turn'd away, and lough."

Let them laugh. The king enjoyed his pork, and was himself again. Anon he called for the head of that swine, and fearful was the dismay of the cook. But soon the cook's terrors were dissipated, for Richard had a strong stomach, and the discovery caused him no disgust after all.

Hagiology makes devout and admiring record of Saint Narbert's virtue in swallowing, without flinching, the spider he saw floating in the consecrated cup.

It has been said of refinement, that, being clean itself, it supposes that others are clean also, until forcibly undeceived-indeed, resolutely prefers to trust, rather than have the imagination polluted by the repulsive