"Again. To _despise_ a person is properly to _look down_ upon him with none or the least possible emotion. But when Clementina, who has lately lost her lover, with bosom heaving, eyes flashing, and her whole frame in agitation, pronounces with a peculiar emphasis that she '_despises_ the fellow,' depend upon it that he is not quite so despicable in her eyes as she would have us imagine. "One more instance. If we must naturalize that portentous phrase, _a truism_, it were well that we limited the use of it. Every commonplace or trite observation is not a truism. For example: A good name helps a man on in the world. This is nothing but a simple truth, however hackneyed. It has a distinct subject and predicate. But when the thing predicated is involved in the term of the subject, and so necessarily involved that by no possible conception they can be separated, then it becomes a truism; as to say, A good name is a proof of a man's estimation in the world. We seem to be saying something, when we say nothing. I was describing to F---- some knavish tricks of a mutual friend of ours. 'If he did so and so,' was the reply, 'he cannot be an honest man.' Here was a genuine truism, truth upon truth, inference and proposition identical,--or rather, a dictionary definition usurping the place of an inference." * * * * * "We are ashamed at sight of a monkey,--somehow as we are shy of poor relations." * * * * * "C---- imagined a Caledonian compartment in Hades, where there should be fire without sulphur." * * * * * "Absurd images are sometimes irresistible. I will mention two. An elephant in a coach-office gravely coming to have his trunk booked;--a mermaid over a fish-kettle cooking her own tail." * * * * * "It is the praise of Shakspeare, with reference to the playwriters, his contemporaries, that he has so few revolting characters. Yet be has one that is singularly mean and disagreeable,--the King in 'Hamlet.' Neither has he characters of insignificance, unless the phantom that stalks over the stage as Julius Caesar, in the play of that name, may be accounted one. Neither has he envious characters, excepting the short part of Don John, in 'Much Ado about Nothing.' Neither has he unentertaining characters, if we except Parolles, and the little that there is of the Clown, in 'All's Well that Ends Well.'" * * * * * "It would settle the dispute as to whether Shakspeare intended Othello for a jealous character, to consider how differently we are affected towards him, and for Leontes in the 'Winter's Tale.' Leontes _is_ that character. Othello's fault was simply credulity." * * * * *