in that style of exalted fury was rather to be pitied and admired when he smothered a woman on a misunderstanding. She should not have teased him so to take back Cassio; and what could she have expected when she was so careless about the handkerchief and told such lies about it! It is somewhat unpleasant to be smothered, to be sure, but all the same she ought to be content and happy to be the object of such love and the occasion of such jealousy. They mourned far more over his fate than over hers. This representation of manly jealousy, so elemental and simple, and yet so stupendous, is one of Shakespeare's masterpieces. I mean not merely in its verbal expression, but in its characteristic conception of the masculine form of the passion. Compare it with the jealousy of any of his women--of Adriana, of Julia, of Cleopatra, of Imogen, of Regan--and see how different it is in kind; I will not say in degree; for Shakespeare has not exhibited woman as highly deformed by this passion; that he left for inferior dramatists, with whom it is a favorite subject. In two of these tragedies we have Shakespeare's most elaborate and, so to speak, admirable representations of villany: Edmund in "King Lear" and Iago in "Othello." These vile creations cannot, however, be justly regarded as the fruit of a lower view of human nature consequent upon a longer acquaintance with it. They were merely required by the exigencies of his plots; and being required, he made them as it was in him to do. For in nothing is his superiority more greatly manifested than in the fact that monsters of baseness, or even thoroughly base men, figure so rarely among his _dramatis personæ_. They are common with inferior dramatists and writers of prose fiction, whose ruder hands need them as convenient motive powers and as vehicles of the expression of a lower view of human nature. Not so with him. He has weak and erring men--men who are misled by their passions, ambition, revenge, selfish lust, or what not; but Iago, Edmund, and the Duke in "Measure for Measure" are almost all his characters of their kind. In "Richard III." he merely painted a highly colored historical portrait; and Parolles, in "All's Well that Ends Well," and Iachimo, in "Cymbeline," do not rise to the dignity of even third-rate personages. Iago, it need hardly be said, is the most perfect of all his creatures in this kind, and indeed he is the most admirably detestable and infamous character in all literature. Edmund is equally base and cruel; but compared with Iago he is a coarse, low, brutal, and rabid animal. In Iago all the craft and venom of which the human soul is capable is united with an intellectual subtlety which seems to reach the limit of imagination or conception. There are some who see in the making the bastard son in "Lear" the monster of ingratitude and villany and the legitimate a model of all the manly and filial virtues an evidence of Shakespeare's judgment and discrimination.