selfishness. It gives us a high and permanent interest, beyond
ourselves, in humanity as such. It raises the great, the remote, and
the possible to an equality with the real, the little and the near.
It makes man a partaker with his kind. It subdues and softens the
stubbornness of his will. It teaches him that there are and have
been others like himself, by showing him as in a glass what they
have felt, thought, and done. It opens the chambers of the human
heart. It leaves nothing indifferent to us that can affect our
common nature. It excites our sensibility by exhibiting the passions
wound up to the utmost pitch by the power of imagination or the
temptation of circumstances; and corrects their fatal excesses in
ourselves by pointing to the greater extent of sufferings and of
crimes to which they have led others. Tragedy creates a balance of
the affections. It makes us thoughtful spectators in the lists of
life. It is the refiner of the species; a discipline of humanity.
The habitual study of poetry and works of imagination is one chief
part of a well-grounded education. A taste for liberal art is
necessary to complete the character of a gentleman, Science alone is
hard and mechanical. It exercises the understanding upon things out
of ourselves, while it leaves the affections unemployed, or
engrossed with our own immediate, narrow interests.--OTHELLO
furnishes an illustration of these remarks. It excites our sympathy
in an extraordinary degree. The moral it conveys has a closer
application to the concerns of human life than that of any other of
Shakespeare's plays. 'It comes directly home to the bosoms and
business of men.' The pathos in LEAR is indeed more dreadful and
overpowering: but it is less natural, and less of every day's
occurrence. We have not the same degree of sympathy with the
passions described in MACBETH. The interest in HAMLET is more remote
and reflex. That of OTHELLO is at once equally profound and