dramatic personages are there in Shakspeare, which though more
tractable and feasible (if I may so speak) than Lear, yet from some
circumstance, some adjunct to their character, are improper to be
shown to our bodily eye! Othello, for instance. Nothing can be more
soothing, more flattering to the nobler parts of our natures, than to
read of a young Venetian lady of the highest extraction, through the
force of love and from a sense of merit in him whom she loved, laying
aside every consideration of kindred, and country, and color, and
wedding with a _coal-black Moor_--(for such he is represented, in the
imperfect state of knowledge respecting foreign countries in those
days, compared with our own, or in compliance with popular notions,
though the Moors are now well enough known to be by many shades less
unworthy of a white woman's fancy)--it is the perfect triumph of
virtue over accidents, of the imagination over the senses. She sees
Othello's color in his mind. But upon the stage, when the imagination
is no longer the ruling faculty, but we are left to our poor
unassisted senses, I appeal to every one that has seen Othello
played, whether he did not, on the contrary, sink Othello's mind in
his color; whether he did not find something extremely revolting in
the courtship and wedded caresses of Othello and Desdemona; and
whether the actual sight of the thing did not overweigh all that
beautiful compromise which we make in reading;--and the reason it
should do so is obvious, because there is just so much reality
presented to our senses as to give a perception of disagreement, with
not enough of belief in the internal motives,--all that which is
unseen,--to overpower and reconcile the first and obvious
prejudices.[1] What we see upon a stage is body and bodily action;
what we are conscious of in reading is almost exclusively the mind,
and its movements; and this I think may sufficiently account for the
very different sort of delight with which the same play so often
affects us in the reading and the seeing.

[Footnote 1: The error of supposing that because Othello's color does
not offend us in the reading, it should also not offend us in the
seeing, is just such a fallacy as supposing that an Adam and Eve in a
picture shall affect us just as they do in the poem. But in the poem
we for a while have Paradisiacal senses given us, which vanish when
we see a man and his wife without clothes in the picture. The
painters themselv