to afford him shelter and protection; he constrains himself to recount once more the baseness which he has always before spoken of in accents of wild fury; but now his language is involuntarily changed:
"'Tis pitiful; but yet Iago knows
That she with Cassio has the act of shame
A thousand times committed."
Vain efforts! he is at length compelled to contemplate himself as he really is. Deprived of a being of spotless goodness, whom he adored, he now sees himself as others see him, the object not only of horror, but also of derision and contempt. Such epithets as calumniator, murderer assassin, are too gentle for him—he is an infuriated mad man, an enraged wild beast, a bull goaded by the gad-fly, or which has thrown itself, with determination to trample under its feet and to gore with its horns, upon a piece of red cloth which a malicious hand has placed before its eyes. He is in exactly the same position as Ajax, in Sophocles, at the moment when he recovers his senses, after his unhappy mania has departed.
Such words as
"O, gull! O, dolt!
As ignorant as dirt!"
are showered down upon Othello from all sides. At first he holds down his head, abandoned to his self-recriminations—he is disarmed like a child.
"I am not valiant, neither,
But every puny whipster gets my sword."
But immediately he adds, and this relieves him,
"But why should honor outlive honesty?
Let it go, all."