visibly and glowed with admiring sympathy and fluttered with gentle fear."* In another of this vivid writer's fictions we read of another hero and other listeners, after the challenging query, Who is so devoid of egotism as not to like to tell his own adventures to sympathizing beauty? that "He told his story in detail, . . . and as he told it, their lovely eyes seemed on fire; and they were red and pale, by turns.” Mrs. Gore's Emma Cromer is to be seen turning "deathly pale" at Reresby's recital of eastern travel, and laying a cold and tremulous hand on the arm of another fair listener. But it is pretty much the same with her, apparently, as with Scott's Matilda, when Redmond "knew so well o'er all to throw His spirit's wild romantic glow, That while she blamed, and while she fear'd, She loved each venturous tale she heard." Not to compare her too closely with one of whom Coleridge ecstatically wrote, "Few sorrows hath she of her own. My hope! my joy! my Genevieve! She loves me best, whene'er I sing The songs that make her grieve." In the case of M. Soulie's Victor and Julie, "Julie l'écoutait, et comme Desdemona, elle l'aimait pour ce qu'il avait souffert." So with Captain Kirke and Magdalen in No Name, when she led him into talking of the perils of the sea: twice he had been shipwrecked; times innumerable he and all with him had been threatened with death, and had escaped their doom by the narrowness of the hair's breadth; and she would sit listening to him with a breathless interest, looking at him with a breathless wonder, as those fearful storiesmade doubly vivid by the simple language in which he told them-fell, one by one, from his lips. She was enamoured * Miss Austen's readers may call to mind "the glow of Fanny's cheek," in Mansfield Park, "the brightness of her eye, the deep attention, the absorbed interest," with which she listened to the young sailor's description of the imminent hazards and terrific scenes which his experience afloat, in war-time, could supply in satisfaction of almost any demand. of his "noble unconsciousness of his own heroism," the artless modesty with which he described his own acts of dauntless endurance and devoted courage, without an idea that they were anything more than plain acts of duty to which he was bound by the vocation that he followed. What though the man was no younker, and no beauty? The author of the Parisians assures us that beauty has little to do with engaging the love of women: the air, the manner, the tone, the conversation, the something that interests, and the something to be proud of these are the attributes of the man made to be loved. Happy the warrior that is sure of one loving listener when the hurly-burly's done, when the battle's lost and won. "Welcome nights of broken sleep, and days of carnage cold, Could I deem that thou would'st weep to hear my perils told." The love of Dido for Æneas has been defined as a thing of the imagination, an impulse of genuine hero-worship, owing more to the ear than to the eye: it was excited by his narrative of the sack of Troy, and his subsequent wanderings over the melancholy main. "It resembled the passion of Othello for Desdemona," says one Virgilian critic. A love born of pity speaks in the first words of the tempesttried hero: O sola infandos Troja miserata labores. * If in one sense it be taking us still further away from Othello and Desdemona, in another it may help to bring us back to them, if we apply, in conclusion, these four lines from Idylls of the King,— "However marr'd, of more than twice her years, § III. OTHELLO'S ONLY WITCHCRAFT. Othello, Act i., Sc. 3. THAT Brabantio's daughter, a Venetian senator's only child, should become enamoured of a sooty Moor,-to what could Brabantio in his proud wrath impute it, but to the use of foul charms and chains of magic? There was witchcraft in the case, he felt quite sure. How else could ever a maid so tender, fair, and happy, so fond of her father and her home, and "so opposite to marriage that she shunned the wealthy curled darlings" of her own nation, have run from her endeared surroundings to the "sooty bosom of such a thing as this shady foreigner? Nigger was not a phrase current * Was Othello a negro? The question has been put at divers times, and answered in sundry manners. A. W. Schlegel hails as a most "fortunate mistake" that the Moor (under which name in the original novel a baptized Saracen of the northern coast of Africa was unquestionably meant) has been made by Shakspeare "in every respect a negro' -recognizing in him, as we are made to do, the wild nature of that glowing zone which generates the most ferocious birds of prey and the deadliest poisons-tamed only in appearance by the desire of fame, by foreign laws of honour, and by nobler and milder manners. Commenting on the term "thick-lips" as applied to him by Roderigo, Coleridge asks if it be possible to imagine Shakspeare so utterly ignorant as to make a barbarous negro plead royal birth,—at a time, too, when negroes were not known except as slaves? The rivalry of Roderigo may sufficiently account for his wilful confusion of Moor and Negro. Though no doubt Desdemona saw Othello's visage in his mind, yet would it be "something monstrous to conceive this beautiful Venetian girl falling in love with a veritable negro," and would argue in her a disproportionateness, a want of balance, which Shakspeare does not appear to have in the least contemplated. So again the late Professor H. Reed rejected the "repulsive notion" that Othello was a black, a coarse-featured African, as directly at variance with the requisitions of both poetry and history: the Moor he claimed as one of that adventurous race of men who, striking out from the heart of Arabia, had made conquest of Persia and Syria, and, overturning the ancient sovereignty of Egypt, swept in victory along the whole northern coast of Africa, and passing thence across the narrow frith of the Mediterranean, scattered the dynasty of the Goths with in Venetian society, high or low; but nigger was in Brabantio's mind's eye when it lighted on Othello's face, and perhaps would have been on his lips had he sounded the depths of its future capacity as an expression of arrogant contempt and vituperative insult. This Moor, then, he charged before the Senate with practising on Desdemona with unlawful acts, abusing her delicate youth with drugs Roderick at their head; who in the most fertile region of Spain built up an empire which lasted for centuries; who preserved the literature of Greece -its philosophy and science-when Greece herself was prostrate and benighted; and who, even after the powers of the caliphs in their several realms began to decline, were the chosen and honoured captains of the armies of Christian states. Especially, we read, was this the policy of the Venetian Republic, to lessen by the employment of mercenary commanders the danger of domestic intrigue. How true then to his nature was it for Othello to "stand in conscious pride—the descendant of a race of kings-the representative of the Arabs who had been sovereigns in Europe-his spirit glowing with noble ancestral memories." On the other hand, it is shown to have been perfectly consistent with the debasing malignity of Iago, and with the petulant disappointment of such a foppish Venetian as Roderigo, to be blind to all that ennobled and dignified the Moorish name-to see no distinction between the chivalrous Moor, the chieftain of Christian armies, and the barbarous Ethiop, the despised slave. "It was natural that vulgar words should be uttered from the lips of such men, and also that the parental frenzy of Desdemona's father should find relief in the same strain of vituperative misrepresentation-the propensity of a fresh and angry grief to magnify its injury." And such are the assignable authorities which have led to the supposition that Othello was black. If the Moor does, indeed, so speak of himself in one scene, it is when he is "changing with the poison," and the agony of doubt incites him to morbid exaggeration. For the sake of the gentle lady wedded to the Moor it is pleaded that we should by all means discard the blackamoor fallacy-lest we be tempted to think, otherwise, that so monstrous an alliance was fitly blotted out in its fearful catastrophe. Black is a colour with a large variety of shades; and a variety of meanings may be assigned to it, sometimes simply the converse of lightcomplexioned, or fair, as when Thurio, in the Two Gentlemen of Verona, denies that his face is fair, and asserts it to be "black"-whereupon Sir Proteus airily replies, "But pearls are fair; and the old saying is, Black men are pearls in beauteous ladies' eyes," Christopher North favoured the negro notion when he argued, in the or minerals, enchanting her with noxious spells and medicines bought of mountebanks.* Let him deny it, if he could. Deny it, Othello did. True, he had won the love of Desdemona; true, he had married. But that was the full extent of his offending. He would tell the Senate, and in plain soldierly terms, like the plain soldier he was, how it all came about. He would tell them a round unvarnished tale of his whole course of love; what drugs, what charms, Noctes, that Shakspeare ought to have been above taking an anomalous case of jealousy; for "how could a black husband escape being jealous of a white wife? There was a cause of jealousy given in his very fate." And the Ettrick Shepherd pitied, but could scarcely respect, the white wife," it was a curious kind o' hankerin' after an opposite colour." With better judgment one who, in his time, contributed to the Noctes, Hartley Coleridge to wit, scouted the error which has turned Othello, the sable Mauritanian chieftain, haply descended from the vanquishers of Roderick the Goth, into a rank, woolly-pated, thick-lipped "nigger.” Kemble asked Blumenbach, who had been to see the great tragedian in Othello, “Do you think, sir, that I succeeded in accurately representing the negro character?" "The moral characteristics, yes; but all my illusion was at an end when you opened your hands; you wore black gloves-now the negroes have the inside of the hand flesh-colour." Every one laughed, but the ethnologist was profoundly serious. Cooper was found fault with by some American critics (ridiculed in Salmagundi) for not having made himself as black as a negro; one objector urging that the Moor was probably an Egyptian by birth-like the donor of the too famous handkerchief-and has not Herodotus described the flat noses and frizzled hair of the Egyptians? a clear proof that they were all negroes. It is one of America's best critics, that self-styled Shakspeare's Scholar, Mr. R. Grant White, who finds one fatal fault in Hildebrandt's otherwise "most fascinating of modern pictures," the Othello and Desdemona,—and that is, the notion of love given by such a woman to a great grinning negro with rings in his ears. What though John Quincy Adams essayed to prove Othello to be a negro, and that Retsch made him so in his outlines? Shakspeare's Scholar falls back upon the evidence of his master that "the Moor" was a Mauritanian, and one of lofty lineage. Neither Othello nor Aaron (in the horrible Titus Andronicus) is called an Ethiopian, but both are continually spoken of as Moors. To Mr. Grant White it seems, on the whole, that Shakspeare must have been fully aware of the distinction in grade between the two races, though his notion of their respective traits may have been neither very true nor very clear. Compare the very words as well as the general drift of a passage in |