when the effect has been fully produced, the repetition of triumph-- Go to; farewell; put money enough in your purse! The remainder--Iago's soliloquy--the motive-hunting of a motiveless malignity--how awful it is! Yea, whilst he is still allowed to bear the divine image, it is too fiendish for his own steady view,--for the lonely gaze of a being next to devil, and only not quite devil,--and yet a character which Shakspeare has attempted and executed, without disgust and without scandal! Dr. Johnson has remarked that little or nothing is wanting to render the Othello a regular tragedy, but to have opened the play with the arrival of Othello in Cyprus, and to have thrown the preceding act into the form of narration. Here then is the place to determine, whether such a change would or would not be an improvement;--nay, (to throw down the glove with a full challenge) whether the tragedy would or not by such an arrangement become more regular,--that is, more consonant with the rules dictated by universal reason, on the true common-sense of mankind, in its application to the particular case. For in all acts of judgment, it can never be too often recollected, and scarcely too often repeated, that rules are means to ends, and, consequently, that the end must be determined and understood before it can be known what the rules are or ought to be. Now, from a certain species of drama, proposing to itself the accomplishment of certain ends,--these partly arising from the idea of the species itself, but in part, likewise, forced upon the dramatist by accidental circumstances beyond his power to remove or control,--three rules have been abstracted;--in other words, the means most conducive to the attainment of the proposed ends have been generalized, and prescribed under the names of the three unities,--the unity of time, the unity of place, and the unity of action,--which last would, perhaps, have been as appropriately, as well as more intelligibly, entitled the unity of interest. With this last the present question has no immediate concern: in fact, its conjunction with the former two is a mere delusion of words. It is not properly a rule, but in itself the great end not only of the drama, but of the epic poem, the lyric ode, of all poetry, down to the candle-flame cone of an epigram,--nay of poesy in general, as the proper generic term inclusive of all the fine arts as its species. But of the unities of time and place, which alone are entitled to the name of rules, the history of their origin will be their best criterion. You might take the Greek chorus to a place, but you could not bring a place to them without as palpable an equivoque as bringing Birnam wood to Macbeth at Dunsinane. It was the same, though in a less degree, with regard to the unity of time:--the positive fact, not for a moment removed from the senses, the presence, I mean, of the same identical chorus, was a continued measure