all the tears of the body and all the blood of
the heart: but there is none we love like Othello.

I must part from his presence again for a season, and return to my topic
in the text of _Macbeth_. That it is piteously rent and ragged and
clipped and garbled in some of its earlier scenes, the rough construction
and the poltfoot metre, lame sense and limping verse, each maimed and
mangled subject of players' and printers' most treasonable tyranny,
contending as it were to seem harsher than the other, combine in this
contention to bear indisputable and intolerable witness. Only where the
witches are, and one more potent and more terrible than all witches and
all devils at their beck, can we be sure that such traitors have not
robbed us of one touch from Shakespeare's hand. The second scene of the
play at least bears marks of such handling as the brutal Shakespearean
Hector's of the "mangled Myrmidons"; it is too visibly "noseless,
handless, hacked and chipped" as it comes to us, crying on Hemings and
Condell. And it is in this unlucky scene that unkindly criticism has not
unsuccessfully sought for the gravest faults of language and manner to be
found in Shakespeare. For certainly it cannot be cleared from the charge
of a style stiffened and swollen with clumsy braid and crabbed bombast.
But against the weird sisters, and her who sits above them and apart,
more awful than Hecate's very self, no mangling hand has been stretched
forth; no blight of mistranslation by perversion has fallen upon the
words which interpret and expound the hidden things of their evil will.

To one tragedy as to one comedy of Shakespeare's, the casual or the
natural union of especial popularity with especial simplicity in
selection and in treatment of character makes it as superfluous as it
would be difficult to attempt any application of analytical criticism.
There is nothing in them of a nature so compound or so complex as to call
for solution or resolution into its primal elements. Here there is some
genuine ground for the generally baseless and delusive opinion of self-
complacent sciolism that he who runs may read Shakespeare. These two
plays it is hardly worth while to point out by name: all probable readers
will know them at once for _Macbeth_ and _As You Like It_. There can
hardly be a single point of incident or of character on which the
youngest reader will not find himself at one with the oldest, the dullest
with the brightest a