"I have possessed your Grace of what I purpose;

And by our holy Sabbath have I sworn

To have the due and forfeit of my bond:

If you deny it, let the danger light

Upon your charter, and your city's freedom."

The last two lines were given with an outreaching and arching motion of the arm and hand, palm downward, like the stoop of a bird of prey.

We feel the pressure of the intense passionate purpose, below the logic, in his short colloquies with Bassanio and Gratanio, and in his longer speeches to the court- till Portia, as the Doctor, enters, and speaks of mercy and the law. Against her plea for mercy, as against the twice-blessed quality itself, Shylock sets his face like a flint; but as his religion moved him, at the mention of the name of God, Booth folded his arms upon his breast, and bowed his head in reverence. 'My deeds upon my head!"

exclaims Shylock. As Christ was mercy, there may have been floating in Shakespeare's mind that other fearful imprecation, "His blood be on us and on our children.”. The dark effluence of the same spirit appears in the language of the Jew. Booth gave the words with solid force, as after, in saying:

" An oath, an oath, I have an oath in heaven:
Shall I lay perjury upon my soul?

No, not for Venice,"

he stood a type of the religion of the law.

The crisis of the play arrives. Shylock finds his "justice" a two-edged sword, and is suffering from the unexpected stroke of it. Foiled of the penalty he craves, he says:

"I take this offer then: pay the bond thrice,

And let the Christian-go,"

uttered between set teeth, and with repeated gesture of repulsion: still holding to the last, his pride of faith as the dominant element of his cruel mind.

IAGO.

AN actor is the only innocent hypocrite. That a man of Mr. Booth's probity and generosity of soul, should have so insphered the character of Iago as to make it one of his most admirable and popular representations, is a case in point. Iago seems not so much a debauched intelligence as an intelligence which had been the devil's own from the beginning. Yet his diabolism was not of that kind which delights primarily in others' pain. It consisted rather in an unresting intellectual activity, without moral principle or human feeling.

am.”

He is a constitutional liar. He brags of it. In audacious contrast to Him who said, "I am that I am," Iago says, "I am not what I Danger and crime are necessary to give scope to the action of his fertile brain. He is the embodiment of spiritual wickedness in human character. And we must resort to this paradox, in order to make him human ; that he seeks for motives, which are in them

selves criminal, in order to justify the proceeding of his spontaneous malignity. He is the parent of many a villain in more recent literary art. The Mephistopheles of Goethe is of his family, at the least a cousin-german. But Goethe slights his fiend into heaven, and gives him preternatural power to work mischief on the earth: while Iago's successes (which are only postponed failures) are the mere product of his busy brain, and his plumed-up will. He "works by wit, and not by witchcraft."

Hazlitt says that Kean made Iago "a gay light-hearted monster; a careless, cordial, comfortable villain." Booth gave quite another version. His conception was saturnine; but the expression of it was strangely swift and brilliant. He showed the dense force, the stealth, the velvet-footed grace of the panther; the subtlety, the fascination, the rapid stroke of the fanged serpent. There was less variation in his performances, one from the other, of this part, than he exhibited in the portrayal of any other Shakespearean character. Whatever difference did exist, lay in the greater or less intensity of the representation.

On the 15th of September, 1847, as we most vividly remember, he was possessed by his most splendid devil. He came on the stage, clear as spirit, and the voice he used was that most sweet and audible, deep-revolving bass. He "talked far above singing." His delivery of the text was a masterpiece of colloquial style. It had all the abrupt turns, the tones of nature, the unexpectedness, and the occasional persuasive force, which belong to the best conversation. In the first scene, having quieted Roderigo's complaints, he breaks out with

"Call up her father;

Rouse him (that is, Othello), make after him, poison his delight,

Proclaim him in the streets; incense her kinsmen,

And though he in a fertile climate dwell,

Plague him with flies: though that his joy be joy,
Yet throw such changes of vexation on 't,
As it may lose some color."

Observe the rapid alternation of subject in these lines, and the chasing up of mischievous suggestion they contain.

Roderigo. Here is her father's house: I'll call aloud.

Iago.

Do with like timorous accent and dire yell,
As when (by night and negligence) the fire
Is spied in populous cities.

There was no heat in this passage.

Booth