acted!" This was
"Francis I.," the production of which on the stage was a bitter
annoyance to me, to prevent which I would have given anything I
possessed, but which made me (vexed and unhappy though I was at the
circumstance on which I was being congratulated) an object of positive
envy to the distinguished authoress and kind old lady.

In order to steer clear of the passion of revenge, which is in fact
hatred proceeding from a sense of injury, Miss Joanna Baillie in her
fine tragedy of "De Montfort" has inevitably made the subject of it an
_antipathy_--that is, an instinctive, unreasoning, partly physical
antagonism, producing abhorrence and detestation the most intense,
without any adequate motive; and the secret of the failure of her noble
play on the stage is precisely that this is not (fortunately) a natural
passion common to the majority of human beings (which hatred that _has_
a motive undoubtedly is, in a greater or less degree), but an abnormal
element in exceptionally morbid natures, and therefore a sentiment (or
sensation) with which no great number of people or large proportion of a
public audience can sympathize or even understand. Intense and causeless
hatred is one of the commonest indications of insanity, and, alas! one
that too often exhibits itself toward those who have been objects of the
tenderest love; but De Montfort is not insane, and his loathing is
unaccountable to healthy minds upon any other plea, and can find no
comprehension in audiences quite prepared to understand, if not to
sympathize with, the vindictive malignity of Shylock and the savage
ferocity of Zanga. Goethe, in his grand play of "Tasso," gives the poet
this morbid detestation of the accomplished courtier and man of the
world, Antonio; but then, Tasso is represented as on the very verge of
that madness into the dark abyss of which he subsequently sinks.

Shakespeare's treatment of the passion of hatred, in "The Merchant of
Venice," is worthy of all admiration for the profound insight with which
he has discriminated between that form of it which all men comprehend,
and can sympathize with, and that which, being really nothing but
diseased idiosyncrasy, appears to the majority of healthy minds a mere
form of madness.

In his first introduction to us the Jew accounts for his detestation of
Antonio upon three very comprehensible grounds: national race hatred, in
feeling and exciting which the Jews have been quite a "peculiar people