When once we likewise have seen Othello's visage in his mind, we
see too how much more of greatness is in this mind than in another
hero's. For such an one, even a boy may well think how thankfully and
joyfully he would lay down his life. Other friends we have of
Shakespeare's giving whom we love deeply and well, if hardly with such
love as could weep for him 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.
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