instrument which they have not breath enough to fill. Let me point out, my dear Smith, to your particular notice, a play which I think you will agree with me illustrates all that I have said. In _Othello_ you will find the nature of the seventeenth century still forced upon us in this prodigious power--with which, unless by the magic of the author's name, we should have no sympathy; and a decided proof of how nearly allied his genius, like that of every body else worth mentioning of his day, was to madness. First, No man of the nineteenth century who knew the noble position in which civilization and religion have placed woman, would have fixed on such a subject. In the closet, when you only see the courage, fame, and dignity of the hero, you can find some excuses for the girl who is won by these attributes, and bestows her love on the possessor of them, albeit he is fallen into the sere and yellow leaf. But look at him on the stage--though the best and most intellectual of our actors represent him, and this I can answer for, as the last I saw in the character was Macready--your sympathy with Desdemona is at once at an end. The woolly hair spoils all--the black face separates him as much from the pure and trusting love of a girl of eighteen, as if he were an ourangoutang. We agree at once with the sensible old gentleman her father, that no maid "So tender, fair, and happy, Would ever have to incur a general mock, Run from her guardage to the sooty bosom Of such a thing as he." The sight of her endearments is nearly as horrid as those of Titania to Bottom are absurd. They are not paired, and all through the play you never can get quit of the disagreeable idea of the blubber lips. If he could be made into a noble statue in mahogany, (not ebony,) a Christianized Abdel Kader--a _real Moor_ and not a _blackâmoor_--the matter would be infinitely better; but no--Shakspeare meant him for a true specimen of the nigger, or why all the taunts about his colour, and the surprise that was evidently excited among the gossips of Venice by the match? The very refinement bestowed on Desdemona makes us have greater horror at her fault, and less sorrow at her griefs. If she had been a mere domestic piece of furniture, without any delicacy or sentiment, we should not have been more revolted at _her_ wedding than at the nuptials of Dyce Sombre. But Desdemona, a gentle lady, married to a Sambo!--impossible! She was either not the fair and simple creature she is painted to us, or she did not outrage humanity so abominably as to follow the example of the brewer's maid in the charming song you favoured us with in the skittle-ground, of which the burden is-- "She ran away with a black man." If she did, choking with a pillow is too good for her; she ought rather to have been done to death in a bag of soot.