nature
of noble pride and grief venting themselves in a momentary peevishness of
resentment toward Florizel:--

... "Will't please you, Sir, be gone!"

_Ib._ Speech of Autolycus:--

"Let me have no lying; it becomes none but tradesmen, and they
often give us soldiers the lie; but we pay them for it with
stamped coin, not stabbing steel;--therefore they do not _give_ us
the lie."

As we _pay_ them, they, therefore, do not _give_ it us.

"Othello."

Act i. sc. 1.--

Admirable is the preparation, so truly and peculiarly Shakespearian, in
the introduction of Roderigo, as the dupe on whom Iago shall first
exercise his art, and in so doing display his own character. Roderigo,
without any fixed principle, but not without the moral notions and
sympathies with honour, which his rank and connections had hung upon him,
is already well fitted and predisposed for the purpose; for very want of
character and strength of passion, like wind loudest in an empty house,
constitute his character. The first three lines happily state the nature
and foundation of the friendship between him and Iago,--the purse,--as also
the contrast of Roderigo's intemperance of mind with Iago's coolness,--the
coolness of a preconceiving experimenter. The mere language of
protestation,--

"If ever I did dream of such a matter, abhor me,"--

which, falling in with the associative link, determines Roderigo's
continuation of complaint,--

"Thou told'st me, thou didst hold him in thy hate,"--

elicits at length a true feeling of Iago's mind, the dread of contempt
habitual to those who encourage in themselves, and have their keenest
pleasure in, the expression of contempt for others. Observe Iago's high
self-opinion, and the moral, that a wicked man will employ real feelings,
as well as assume those most alien from his own, as instruments of his
purposes:--

"And, by the faith of man,
I know my price, I am worth no worse a place."

I think Tyrwhitt's reading of "life" for "wife"--

"A fellow almost damn'd in a fair _wife_"--

the true one, as fitting to Iago's contempt for whatever did not display
power, and that intellectual power. In what follows, let the reader feel
how by and through the glass of two passions, disappointed vanity and
envy, the very vices of which he is complaining, are made to act upon him
as if they were so many excellences, and the more appropriately, because
cunning is always admire