sed. There were points in it, though, at which the massive
serenity of the actor's temperament now and then deadened the glow of
feeling and depressed him to undue calmness; he sometimes recovered too
suddenly and fully from a tempest of emotion--as at the agonising appeal
to Iago, "Give me a living reason she's disloyal"; and he was not
enough delirious in the speech about the sybil and the handkerchief. On
the other hand, once yielded to the spell of desecrated feeling, his
mood and his expression of it were immeasurably pathetic and noble.
Those two great ebullitions of despair, "O, now forever," and "Had it
pleased heaven," could not be spoken in a manner more absolutely
heart-broken or more beautifully simple than the manner that was used by
him. In his obvious though silent suffering at the disgrace and
dismissal of Cassio; in the dazed, forlorn agony that blended with his
more active passion throughout the scene of Iago's wicked conquest of
his credulity; in his occasional quick relapses into blind and sweet
fidelity to the old belief in Desdemona; in his unquenchable tenderness
for her, through the delirium and the sacrifice; and in the tone of
soft, romantic affection--always spiritualised, never sensual--that his
deep and loving sincerity diffused throughout the work, was shown the
grand unity of the embodiment; a unity based on the simple passion of
love. To hear that actor say the one supreme line to Iago, "I am bound
to thee forever," was to know that he understood and felt the meaning
of the character, to its minutest fibre and its profoundest depth.

There were touches of fresh and aptly illustrative "business" in the
encounter of Othello and Iago, in the great scene of the third act. The
gasping struggles of Iago heightened the effect of the Moor's fury, and
the quickly suppressed impulse and yell of rage with which he finally
bounded away made an admirable effect of nature. In the last scene
McCullough rounded his performance with a solemn act of sacrifice. There
was nothing animal, nothing barbaric, nothing insane, in the slaughter
of Desdemona. It was done in an ecstasy of justice, and the atmosphere
that surrounded the deed was that of awe and not of horror.

For the character of King Lear McCullough possessed the imposing
stature, the natural majesty, the great reach of voice, and the human
tenderness that are its basis and equipment. No actor of Lear can ever
satisfy a sympathetic lover of the part