nor does he assume the part of omniscience. He sometimes goes contrary to our natural expectation or to our views, as man judges fragmentarily and short-sightedly. Shakespeare judges more as the Bible does, which book he studied, and which is the true transcript of human nature, because man's spirit is a great deep, a blending of good and evil, of wisdom and folly, strength and weakness, swayed now by this motive and now by that; capable of vast effort, but perishing before the moth; a creature of heaven and earth, higher than the angels and sometimes lower than the brutes, a being of passions and affections as well as of rational judgments, and as diversified and unaccountable as the nature he lives in. In a word, morality is at the foundation of Shakespeare's greatness as a dramatic author. It is the quality which discerns the true in things and is at the same time genial and just, springing from the heart; as Goethe says in Faust,

"Gefühl ist alles."

There is one fact about Shakespeare's morality

which should not be forgotten, and that is, in the period of dramatic art which followed Shakespeare, or the age of the Charleses, of Dryden, Congreve, and Wycherley, the drama allied itself to the profligacy of the times, to the forces of temptation and evil, while Shakespeare's plays did not do so. He was not a seducer to vice, and his corruption, if it might be so called, does not corrupt. It did not stick and smutch, and we pass over the ribald speeches of "the fat knight" and do not remember them, since they are the reflections of a gross time rather than emanations of his mind. Often he suddenly rises from earth and its baseness, and in a moment we are lifted into the clear empyrean of most delicate poetry, like Ariel's song, heard above the cries of drunken seamen, and touched by rainbow tints and the breath of flowers. Even the bestial Caliban, when freedom comes to him, grows poetic and sings of the deep secrets of nature that he has learned from his witchdam Sycorax. Shakespeare says:

"A golden mind

Stoops not to shows of dross."

Shakespeare is now not so much played as he is read, and this shows progress in the appreciation of his literary genius, but he surely should be read with a broad and generous mind, for he believed in the greatness of man's spirit, and that every human being is based on the moral law in the constitution of his nature, so that "the whole is mirrored in the individual.”

The chief object of this little book is intended to be my own impressions, especially of Shakespeare's plays, one and several, and in these introductory remarks thus far, I will allude to but one play, as it has a bearing on what has been already said in regard to the moral aim of ShakespeareOTHELLO, THE MOOR OF VENICE. This play has a deep moral; it is drawn from a story found in an Italian novel of the same title, by one Giraldi Cinthio, it being Shakespeare's lordly way of seizing on the stories and plots of other authors and making them new, no matter how often these had been used by dramatists, as, for illustration, there were three Parthenons on the Acropolis before the Parthenon of Iktinos was reared out of

their ruins. Othello is not the central figure. He is a Saracen soldier, and should be represented with the finely-cut features, manly figure, tall, powerful form of that Arab race, specimens of which are now to be seen in Arabia and Egypt, who with resistless force conquered Northern Africa and the southern provinces of Spain, rising superior to their Christian neighbors in the arts of civilization, but enervated by centuries of peace were driven out of Spain. Othello was a brave soldier, laconic and proud, but capable of true affection. He was absorbed in his love of Desdemona, and talked to her freely of his stirring and perilous life. It is not, however, Othello who forms the central character of this play, since amid all the splendid and changing scenes of this drama there is one other figure on whom the mind of the reader becomes fixed. He is not only everywhere, but his personality is the occasion and cause of the action of others. He grows terribly fascinating. His presence, imperturbable, sometimes smiling, polite in his address, looks out from every scene, whether at Venice or Cyprus, in the council hall,

the midnight revel, the chamber of love, and the chamber of death. Iago pulls the string that moves each tongue and arm. He points Roderigo's sword at his friend's breast; he prompts the intemperate fury of Cassio; he brings tears into the undimmed eyes of Desdemona; he unsettles the steady mind of Othello, and "the tragic loading of the bed" is his work. He is a man without humanity, a polished intellect without a ray of intellectual elevation. When Richard

III. cries out on Bosworth Field,

"A thousand hearts are great within my bosom,"

we almost forget the tyrant and murderer, and wish him a soldier's grave; when the usurping king of Denmark soliloquizes pathetically about his crime and kneels to ask heaven's forgiveness, we yield him a kind of pity and feel that though a deep offender he has some feeling; but Iago has no such "compunctious visitings," and he scoffs at the present and the future. While he does not profess to be an atheist, for the reason that that would be a blunder to his exquisite sense of evil,