lift the overwhelming weight of calamity that oppresses us, and bring us an extraordinary lightening of the heart? Terror and pity are here too much to bear; we long to be allowed to feel also indignation, if not rage; and Emilia lets us feel them and gives them words. She brings us too the relief of joy and admiration,--a joy that is not lessened by her death. Why should she live? If she lived for ever she never could soar a higher pitch, and nothing in her life became her like the losing it.[122] FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 107: It has been held, for example, that Othello treated Iago abominably in preferring Cassio to him; that he _did_ seduce Emilia; that he and Desdemona were too familiar before marriage; and that in any case his fate was a moral judgment on his sins, and Iago a righteous, if sharp, instrument of Providence.] [Footnote 108: See III. iii. 201, V. i. 89 f. The statements are his own, but he has no particular reason for lying. One reason of his disgust at Cassio's appointment was that Cassio was a Florentine (I. i. 20). When Cassio says (III. i. 42) 'I never knew a Florentine more kind and honest,' of course he means, not that Iago is a Florentine, but that he could not be kinder and honester if he were one.] [Footnote 109: I am here merely recording a general impression. There is no specific evidence, unless we take Cassio's language in his drink (II. ii. 105 f.) to imply that Iago was not a 'man of quality' like himself. I do not know if it has been observed that Iago uses more nautical phrases and metaphors than is at all usual with Shakespeare's characters. This might naturally be explained by his roving military life, but it is curious that almost all the examples occur in the earlier scenes (see _e.g._ I. i. 30, 153, 157; I. ii. 17, 50; I. iii. 343; II. iii. 65), so that the use of these phrases and metaphors may not be characteristic of Iago but symptomatic of a particular state of Shakespeare's mind.] [Footnote 110: See further Note P.] [Footnote 111: But it by no means follows that we are to believe his statement that there was a report abroad about an intrigue between his wife and Othello (I. iii. 393), or his statement (which may be divined from IV. ii. 145) that someone had spoken to him on the subject.] [Footnote 112: See, for instance, Aaron in _Titus Andronicus_, II. iii.; Richard in _3 Henry VI._, III. ii. and V. vi., and in _Richard III._, I. i. (twice), I. ii.; Edmund in _King Lear_, I. ii. (twice), III. iii. and v., V. i.] [Footnote 113: See, further, Note Q.] [Footnote 114: On the meaning which this phrase had for its author, Coleridge, see note on p. 228.][Transcriber's note: Reference is to Footnote 115.]