goodness than she is capable of conceiving evil. To the brutish coarseness and fiendish malignity of this man, her gentleness appears only a contemptible weakness; her purity of affection, which saw "Othello's visage in his mind," only a perversion of taste; her bashful modesty, only a cloak for evil propensities; so he represents them with all the force of language and self-conviction, and we are obliged to listen to him. He rips her to pieces before us--he would have bedeviled an angel! yet such is the unrivalled, though passive delicacy of the delineation, that it can stand it unhurt, untouched! It is wonderful!--yet natural as it is wonderful! After all, there are people in the world, whose opinions and feelings are tainted by an habitual acquaintance with the evil side of society, though in action and intention they remain right; and who, without the real depravity of heart and malignity of intention of Iago, judge as he does of the character and productions of others. ALDA. Heaven bless me from such critics! yet if genius, youth, and innocence could not escape unslurred, can I hope to do so? I pity from my soul the persons you allude to--for to such minds there can exist few uncontaminated sources of pleasure either in nature or in art. MEDON. Ay--"the perfumes of Paradise were poison to the Dives, and made them melancholy."[3] You pity them, and they will sneer at you. But what have we here?--"Characters of Imagination--Juliet--Viola;" are these romantic young ladies the pillars which are to sustain your moral edifice? Are they to serve as examples or as warnings for the youth of this enlightened age? ALDA. As warnings, of course--what else? MEDON. Against the dangers of romance?--but where are they? "Vraiment," as B. Constant says, "je ne vois pas qu'en fait d'enthousiasme, le feu soit a la maison." Where are they--these disciples of poetry and romance, these victims of disinterested devotion and believing truth, these unblown roses--all conscience and tenderness--whom it is so necessary to guard against too much confidence in others, and too little in themselves--where are they? ALDA. Wandering in the Elysian fields, I presume, with the romantic young gentlemen who are too generous, too zealous in defence of innocence, too enthusiastic in their admiration of virtue, too violent in their hatred of vice, too sincere in friendship, too faithful in love, too active and disinterested in the cause of truth-- MEDON.