Thomas Rymer knows exactly how Othello, which he calls "a bloody farce, the tragedy of the pocket-handkerchief," ought to have been done. In the first place, he is angry that the hero should be a black-a-moor, and that the army should be insulted by his being a soldier. Of "Desdemona" he says: "There is nothing in her which is not below any country kitchen-maid--no woman bred out of a pigstye could talk so meanly." Speaking of expression, he writes that "in the neighing of a horse or in the growling of a mastiff there is a meaning, there is as lively expression, and, I may say, more humanity, than in the tragical flights of Shakespeare." He is indignant that the catastrophe of the play should turn on a handkerchief. He would have liked it to have been folded neatly on the bridal couch, and, when Othello was killing Desde-mona, "the fairy napkin might have started up to disarm his fury and stop his ungracious mouth. Then might she, in a trance of fear, have lain for dead; then might he, believing her dead, and touched with remorse, have honestly cut his own throat, by the good leave and with the applause of all the spectators, who might thereupon have gone home with a quiet mind, and admiring the beauty of Providence freely and truly represented in the theater. Then for the unraveling, of the plot, as they call it, never was old {025}deputy recorder in a country town, with his spectacles on, summing up the evidence, at such a puzzle, so blundered and be doltified as is our poet to have a good riddance and get the catastrophe off his hands. What can remain with the audience to carry home with them? How can it work but to delude our senses, disorder our thoughts, scare our imaginations, corrupt our appetite, and till our head with vanity, confusion, tintamarre and jingle-jangle, beyond what all the parish clerks in London could ever pretend to?" He then hopes the audience will go to the play as they go to church, namely, "sit still, look on one another, make no reflection, nor mind the play more than they would a sermon." With regard to "Julius Cæsar," he is displeased that Shakespeare should have meddled with the Romans. He might be "familiar with Othello and Iago as his own natural acquaintances, but Cæsar and Brutus were above his conversation." To put them "in gulls' coats and make them Jack-puddens," is more than public decency should tolerate--in Mr. Rymer's eyes. Of the well-known scene between Brutus and Cassius, this critic remarks: "They are put there to play the bully and the buffoon, to show their activity of face and muscles. They are to play for a prize, a trial of skill and hugging and swaggering like two drunken Hectors for a twopenny reckoning." Rymer calls his book "A Short View of Tragedy, with Some Reflections on Shakespeare and Other Practitioners for the Stage." Hume thought that both Bacon and Shakespeare showed "a want of simplicity and purity of diction with defective taste and elegance," and that "a reasonable