You are convinced, without a hint, that he is infidel--atheist: everything shaped like religion, like moral conscience--his mind shakes off and rejects with scorn. He does not, however, as I said, disbelieve in Virtues. He believes in them, and uses them to the destruction of the havers. What he disbelieves is the worth of Virtues. To that savage Idol, Self, the more bleeding and noble victims, the more grateful the sacrifice. TALBOYS. A singular combination in him, sir, is his wily Italian wit--like Iachimo's--and his rough--soldierlike--plain, blunt, jovial manners--the tone of the Camp, and of the wild-living, _reckless_ Camp--plenty of hardihood--fit for toil, peril, privation. You never for a moment doubt his courage--his presence of mind--his resources--he does not once quail in presence of Othello at his utmost fury. He does not stir up the Lion from without, through the bars of his cage, with an invisible rod of iron--that is, a whip of scorpions; he lashes up the Wild Beast, and flinches not an inch from paw that would smite, or tusk that would tear--a veritable Lion Queller and King. NORTH. I cannot but believe that the Othello of Shakspeare is black, and all black. I cannot conceive the ethnography of that age drawing--on the stage especially--the finer distinction which we know between a Moor and a Blackamoor or Negro. The opposition, entertained by nature, is between White and Black--not between White and Brown. You want the opposition to tell with all its power. "I saw Othello's visage in his mind" is nothing, unless the visible visage is one to be conquered--to be accepted by losing sight of it. I say again, that I cannot myself imagine the contemporary audience of Shakspeare deciding colour between a Moor and a Negro. The tradition of the Stage, too, seems to have made Othello jet black. Such, I opine, was the notion of the Moor, _then_, to the People, to the Court, to the Stage, to Shakspeare. TALBOYS. Woolly-headed? NORTH. Why, yes--if you choose--in opposition to the "curled darlings." TALBOYS. Yet Coleridge has said it would be "something monstrous to conceive this beautiful Venetian girl failing in love with a veritable Negro." NORTH. Coleridge almost always thought, felt, wrote, and spoke finely, as a Critic--but may I venture, in all love and admiration of that name, to suggest that the removal which the stage makes of a subject from reality must never be forgotten. In life you cannot bear that the White Woman shall marry the Black Man. You could not bear that an English Lady Desdemona--Lady Blanche Howard--should--under any imaginable greatness--marry General Toussaint or the Duke of Marmalade. Your senses revolt with offence and loathing. But on the Stage some consciousness that everything is not as literally meant as it seems--that symbols of humanity, and not actual men and women, are before you--saves the Play. TALBOYS. I believe that Wordsworth's line--