After transcribing the above passage, we were looking about for the traces of the former one, which had ‘vanished into thin air,’ and were beginning to suspect that our parallel had totally failed, till in looking into the lucubrations of Mr. William Wade, who has tried to pick a hole in Shakespear, we learnt that the French translator of our poet had bona fide translated the passage into legitimate French verse, and that Voltaire had in consequence, with singular modesty, complained that Ducis had improved upon the original and stolen the whole turn of the passage from him. To be sure, there is a wide difference in the two passages. There is nothing in the French poet of the ‘No more of that,’ that fine natural interruption to the gasconade which his distress had just extorted from him; there is nothing of ‘One that loved not wisely, but too well,’ there is nothing of Indian pearls or Arabian gums, nor is there any allusion to Aleppo, nor description of ‘a malignant and a turbaned Turk’; nor any thing like that fine return upon himself, and transition from the depth of a dejected spirit to the recollection of former acts of daring defiance, while in his despair he inflicts on himself the blow with which he formerly chastised an insolent foe. These circumstances are given ‘as over-measure’ in Shakespear, and would be considered as superfluous and extravagant by the French critics; yet they are exactly the circumstances which the Moor Othello must have been best acquainted with, and which, as some of the most striking circumstances of his past life, would be forcibly recalled to his memory in parting with it. Voltaire has not invented any thing of the same sort for his dying hero; his speech (though a very good one of its kind) is, as Susannah says to Trim, ‘as flat as the palm of one’s hand;’ it has nothing objectionable in it; it is just such a speech as any crowned head might make in any of the four quarters of the globe.—May we be allowed to add (in passing), that Mr. Kean does not act this scene well? He gnashes his teeth, and strikes the dagger into his bosom, as if he had taken some particular enmity against his own flesh. But this is not so in Shakespear. The feeling of Othello is a lofty absence of mind, in which he throws himself back from the present into the past; the image he recalls furnishes not only the precedent but the consolation of his present act; and the pang which he inflicts on himself is relieved, and unconsciously confounded with the recollection of former acts of grandeur, and elevation of soul. But to proceed.—
In the Agamemnon of Æschylus, is a very beautiful description of the signal fires that were to announce the destruction of Troy, thus translated by Potter:—
[‘What speed could be the herald of this news,’ &c. to
‘Giv’n by my Lord t’announce the fall of Troy.’]
In Drayton’s Polyolbion (Song 30) this idea is finely varied:—
[‘Which Copland scarce had spoke, but quickly every hill,’ &c. to
‘Did mightly commend old Copland for her song.’]
Again, in a poem of Mr. Wordsworth we find the following lines:—
[‘When I had gazed perhaps two minutes’ space,’ &c. to
‘That there was a loud uproar in the hills.’]