eover, if they
once tasted blood they would be strong enough to legislate in favour of
tasting more. It is not to the discredit of the Anglo-Saxon race that it
loves savage sports. The blood is naturally fierce, and has not been
cowed by the tyranny endured by European races. There have been more
free men under England's worst tyrants than under France's most liberal
kings.

But, failing gladiators and wild beasts, the people must have horrors on
the stage, in literature, in art, and, above all, in the daily press.
Shakspere knew that, and Michelangelo, who is the Shakspere of brush and
chisel, knew it also, as those two unrivalled men seem to have known
everything else. And so when Michelangelo painted the _Last Judgment_,
and Shakspere wrote _Othello_ (for instance), they both made use of
horror in a way the Greeks would not have tolerated. Since we no longer
see daily enacted before us scenes of murder, torture, and public
execution, our curiosity makes us desire to see those scenes represented
as accurately as possible. The Greeks, in their tragedies, did their
slaughter behind the scenes, and occasionally the cries of the supposed
victims were heard. But theatre-goers of to-day would feel cheated if
the last act of Othello were left to their imagination. When Salvini
thrusts the crooked knife into his throat, with that ghastly sound of
death that one never forgets, the modern spectator would not understand
what the death-rattle meant, did he not see the action that accompanies
it.

"It is too realistic," said Mr. Barker in his high thin voice when it
was over, and he was helping Margaret with her silken wrappings.

"It is not realistic," said she, "it is real. It may be an unhealthy
excitement, but if we are to have it, it is the most perfect of its
kind."

"It is very horrible," said Miss Skeat; and they drove away.

Margaret would not stay to see the great man after the curtain fell. The
disillusion of such a meeting is too great to be pleasurable. Othello is
dead, and the idea of meeting Othello in the flesh ten minutes later,
smiling and triumphant, is a death-blow to that very reality which
Margaret so much enjoyed. Besides, she wanted to be alone with her own
thoughts, which were not entirely confined to the stage, that night.
Writing to Claudius had brought him vividly into her life again, and she
had caught herself more than once during the evening wondering how her
fair Northern lover would have acte