For truth to o’er-peer.”

Still, self-will ought abnegatingly to give way in docile and disinterested devotion to the public good. The great, strong, fearless man should conquer himself, render his pride impersonal, renounce revenge for individual slights or wrongs, and, instead of despising and insulting the plebeian multitude, labor to abate their vices, remove their errors, guide their efforts, and build their virtues into a fabric of popular freedom and happiness. Then the selfish, passional ideal of the past would give way to the rational, social ideal which is to redeem the future. For, as a general rule thus far in the history of the world, power, both private and public, in the proportion of its degree, has been complacent instead of sympathetic, despotic instead of helpful, indulging its own passions, despising the needs of others, filling civilization itself with the spirit of moral murder. The chief characters of Shakspeare embody this pagan ideal. Is there not a Christian ideal, long since divinely born, but still waiting to be nurtured to full growth, to be illustrated by dramatic genius, and to be glorified in universal realization?

OTHELLO.

There was no character in which Forrest appeared more frequently or with more effect on those who saw him than in that of Othello. He was pre-eminently suited to the part by his own nature and experience, as well as by unwearied observation and study. The play turns on the most vital and popular of all the passions, love, and its revulsion into the most cruel and terrible one, jealousy. He devoted incredible pains to the perfecting of his representation of it; and undoubtedly it was, on the whole, the most true and powerful of all his performances, though in single particulars some others equalled and his Lear surpassed it. Unprejudiced and competent judges agreed that he portrayed Othello in the great phases of his character,—as a man dignified, clear, generous, and calm,—as a man ecstatically happy in an all-absorbing love,—as a man slowly wrought up through the successive degrees of jealousy,—as a man actually converted into a maniac by the frightful conflict and agony of his soul,—and, finally, as a man who in the frenzy of despair closes the scene with murder and suicide;—that he acted all this with an intensity, an accuracy, a varied naturalness and sweeping power very rarely paralleled in the history of the stage. The reason why the portraiture received so much censorious criticism amidst the abundant admiration it excited was because the scale and fervor of the passions bodied forth in it were so much beyond the experience of average natures. They were not exaggerated or false, but seemed so to the cold or petty souls who knew nothing of the lava-floods of bliss and avalanches of woe that ravage the sensibilities of the impassioned souls that find complete fulfilment and lose it. It is a most significant and interesting fact that when the matchless Salvini played Othello in the principal American cities to such enthusiastic applause, his conception and performance of the part were so identical with those of Forrest, and he himself so closely resembled his deceased compeer, that hundreds of witnesses in different portions of the country spontaneously exclaimed that it seemed as if Forrest had risen from the dead and reappeared in his favorite rôle. The old obstinate prejudices did not interfere; and although Salvini made the passion more raw and the force more shuddering and carried the climax one degree farther than the American tragedian had done, actually sinking the human maniac in the infuriated tiger, he was greeted with wondering acclaim. If his portraiture of the Moor was a true one,—as it unquestionably was,—then that of Forrest was equally true and better moderated.

G R Hall
EDWIN FORREST AS
OTHELLO.

In the first speech of Othello, referring to the purpose of Brabantio to injure him with the Duke, Forrest won all hearts by the impression he gave of the noble self-possession of a free and generous nature full of honest affection and manly potency. He alluded to Brabantio without any touch of anger or scorn, to himself with an air of quiet pride bottomed on conscious worth and not on any vanity or egotism, and to Desdemona with a softened tone of effusive warmth which betrayed the precious freight and direction of his heart:

“Let him do his spite;

My services, which I have done the seignory,

Shall out-tongue his complaints. My demerits