ery deep; and to them they are the same kind of
thing. At the one they sit and shed tears, because a good sort of
young man is tempted by a naughty woman to commit _a trifling
peccadillo_, the murder of an uncle or so, that is all, and so comes
to an untimely end, which is _so moving_; and at the other, because a
blackamoor in a fit of jealousy kills his innocent white wife: and the
odds are that ninety-nine out of a hundred would willingly behold the
same catastrophe happen to both the heroes, and have thought the rope
more due to Othello than to Barnwell. For of the texture of Othello's
mind, the inward construction marvellously laid open with all its
strengths and weaknesses, its heroic confidences and its human
misgivings, its agonies of hate springing from the depths of love,
they see no more than the spectators at a cheaper rate, who pay their
pennies a-piece to look through the man's telescope in Leicester-fields,
see into the inward plot and topography of the moon. Some dim thing or
other they see, they see an actor personating a passion, of grief, or
anger, for instance, and they recognize it as a copy of the usual
external effects of such passions; for at least as being true to _that
symbol of the emotion which passes current at the theatre for it_, for
it is often no more than that: but of the grounds of the passion, its
correspondence to a great or heroic nature, which is the only worthy
object of tragedy,--that common auditors know any thing of this, or
can have any such notions dinned into them by the mere strength of an
actor's lungs,--that apprehensions foreign to them should be thus
infused into them by storm, I can neither believe, nor understand how
it can be possible.

We talk of Shakespeare's admirable observation of life, when we should
feel, that not from a petty inquisition into those cheap and every-day
characters which surrounded him, as they surround us, but from his own
mind, which was, to borrow a phrase of Ben Jonson's, the very 'sphere
of humanity', he fetched those images of virtue and of knowledge, of
which every one of us recognizing a part, think we comprehend in our
natures the whole; and oftentimes mistake the powers which he
positively creates in us, for nothing more than indigenous faculties
of our own minds which only waited the action of corresponding virtues
in him to return a full and clear echo of the same.

To return to Hamlet.--Among the distinguishing features of that
won