“If he has secrets from me, he’ll throw all my machinery out of gear,” mused Mr. Lowther; “and yet I don’t quite know that--a secret might be worked into something _with her_. What a wonderful creature that Iago was, by the bye! especially when one considers that he took all that trouble for no better motive than jealous twinges about a wife whom he treated like a dog, and an envious grudge of Cassio’s advancement. Aha, my divine Williams, that’s the only flaw in your _magnum opus_; your motive power isn’t equal to your ponderous machinery! Now if Othello had been the owner of thirty thousand a year and a beautiful wife whom Iago loved, there might have been some reason for the exhibition of a little Italian diplomacy. But revenge! Bah! The luxury of a maniac. The pet wickedness of a woman. Your novelist cannot write a story, your playwright cannot devise a drama, but he must have recourse to revenge to keep the action going. Yet, in the history of men how small and pitiful a part the heroic passion plays! A Cromwell condemns a Charles Stuart to the scaffold. For revenge? No; simply because Charles is in his way. A Robespierre drowns his country in the blood of her sons; and yet I doubt if he bore a hearty grudge against one of his victims--a little political jealousy, perhaps, at the worst. A Richelieu extinguishes the haughty _noblesse_ of France--out of revenge? No; but the _noblesse_ interfere with the schemes of my Lord Cardinal. A Countess of Essex connives at the poisoning of her husband: revenge? not a bit of it, but because she wants to marry some one else; and poor Sir Thomas Overbury must die, not that any one hates the man, but the creature is so tiresome. And Arabella Stuart pines in prison; and the heads of the regicides rot on Temple Bar; and Charles, the merry monarch, the pet of the painters and romancers, the man whose sins have been dealt with so lightly that we are apt to mistake them for virtues--can be as hard as a Nero when it suits him that the patriots Russell and Sidney shall perish in their prime; and James II. sends young Monmouth to the block. Why? Is revenge the impulse that stirs these men’s hearts? Not at all. Not man’s passionate hatred of his neighbour, but man’s devoted love of himself is the motive power that moves the headsman’s arms, and bids the swooping axe descend upon fair young necks from which the lovelocks have been newly shorn. Revenge? Pshaw! Has it a feather’s weight in the balance of history? In all the story of our land, what has revenge to answer for? A semi-mythical Rosamond poisoned in her bower--an Essex condemned in passionate haste, and lamented in dreary leisure by the Queen who loved him--a Konigsmark’s handsome face trampled upon by a German tigress.”