MEDON.

I think it is Coleridge who so finely observes that Shakspeare ever kept
the high road of human life, whereon all travel, that he did not pick
out by-paths of feeling and sentiment; in him we have no moral
highwaymen, and sentimental thieves and rat-catchers, and interesting
villains, and amiable, elegant adulteresses--_a-la-mode Germanorum_--no
delicate entanglements of situation, in which the grossest images are
presented to the mind disguised under the superficial attraction of
style and sentiment. He flattered no bad passion, disguised no vice in
the garb of virtue, trifled with with no just and generous principle. He
can make us laugh at folly, and shudder at crime, yet still preserve our
love for our fellow-beings, and our reverence for ourselves. He has a
lofty and a fearless trust in his own powers, and in the beauty and
excellence of virtue; and with his eye fixed on the lode-star of truth,
steers us triumphantly among shoals and quicksands, where with any other
pilot we had been wrecked:--for instance, who but himself would have
dared to bring into close contact two such characters as Iago and
Desdemona? Had the colors in which he has arrayed Desdemona been one
atom less transparently bright and pure, the charm had been lost; she
could not have borne the approximation: some shadow from the
overpowering blackness of _his_ character must have passed over the
sun-bright purity of _hers_. For observe that Iago's disbelief in the
virtue of Desdemona is not pretended, it is real. It arises from his
total want of faith in all virtue; he is no more capable of conceiving
goodness than she is capable of conceiving evil. To the brutish
coarseness and fiendish malignity of this man, her gentleness appears
only a contemptible weakness; her purity of affection, which saw
"Othello's visage in his mind," only a perversion of taste; her bashful
modesty, only a cloak for evil propensities; so he represents them with
all the force of language and self-conviction, and we are obliged to
listen to him. He rips her to pieces before us--he would have bedeviled
an angel! yet such is the unrivalled, though passive delicacy of the
delineation, that it can stand it unhurt, untouched! It is
wonderful!--yet natural as it is wonderful! After all, there are people
in the world, whose opinions and feelings are tainted by an habitual
acquaintance with the evil side of society, though in action and
intention they remai