has been fully produced, the repetition of triumph:--

"Go to; farewell; put money enough in your purse!"

The remainder--Iago's soliloquy--the motive-hunting of a motiveless
malignity--how awful it is! Yea, whilst he is still allowed to bear the
divine image, it is too fiendish for his own steady view,--for the lonely
gaze of a being next to devil, and only not quite devil,--and yet a
character which Shakespeare has attempted and executed, without disgust
and without scandal!

Dr. Johnson has remarked that little or nothing is wanting to render the
_Othello_ a regular tragedy, but to have opened the play with the arrival
of Othello in Cyprus, and to have thrown the preceding act into the form
of narration. Here then is the place to determine whether such a change
would or would not be an improvement;--nay (to throw down the glove with a
full challenge), whether the tragedy would or not by such an arrangement
become more regular,--that is, more consonant with the rules dictated by
universal reason, on the true common-sense of mankind, in its application
to the particular case. For in all acts of judgment, it can never be too
often recollected, and scarcely too often repeated, that rules are means
to ends, and, consequently, that the end must be determined and understood
before it can be known what the rules are or ought to be. Now, from a
certain species of drama, proposing to itself the accomplishment of
certain ends,--these partly arising from the idea of the species itself,
but in part, likewise, forced upon the dramatist by accidental
circumstances beyond his power to remove or control,--three rules have been
abstracted;--in other words, the means most conducive to the attainment of
the proposed ends have been generalised, and prescribed under the names of
the three unities,--the unity of time, the unity of place, and the unity of
action--which last would, perhaps, have been as appropriately, as well as
more intelligibly, entitled the unity of interest. With this last the
present question has no immediate concern: in fact, its conjunction with
the former two is a mere delusion of words. It is not properly a rule, but
in itself the great end not only of the drama, but of the epic poem, the
lyric ode, of all poetry, down to the candle-flame cone of an
epigram,--nay, of poesy in general, as the proper generic term inclusive of
all the fine arts as its species. But of the unities of time and place,
which alone are ent